Association of Nurses' Self-Reported Empathy and Mu Suppression with Patients' Satisfaction

The aim of this study is to explore the association between mu suppression and self-reported empathy in nurses with patients' satisfaction.

For this correlational study, 30 male nurses, as well as 30 patients took care by these nurses during the week before data gathering, were selected via accessible and random sampling method, respectively. The tools included Jefferson's Scale of Empathy-health professionals, and patient's satisfaction scale of La Monica-Oberst. Activation of Mirror Neurons System (MNS) was investigated by mu suppression. For this purpose, electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded in three phases: 1) Watching the video of a non-moving hand, 2) Watching the video of a hand being open and closed, and 3) Opening and closing one-self's hand. EEG recordings were analyzed using Matlab R 2014a software. Data were analyzed by Pearson's correlation coefficients and multiple regression analyses.

There was no significant correlation between mu suppression in nurses with nurses' self-reported empathy and patients' satisfaction, however, a significant correlation was found between nurses' self-reported empathy and patients' satisfaction. Regression analysis outcomes showed that nurses' self-reported empathy could predict 18.5% (nearly one fifth) of patients' satisfaction variance while mu suppression did not forecast patients' satisfaction significantly.

These findings suggested that mu rhythm was a good biomarker neither for nurses' self-reported empathy nor for patients' satisfaction. In addition, it was manifested that patients' satisfaction, at least partly, depended on skills that nurses could learn, since showing empathy is highly learnable.