Emotion recognition and clinical empathy: An observational study of nurses

To explore nurse ability to recognize emotion and its association with clinical empathy.

Empathy is elemental to nursing care and positively effects patient and nurse outcomes, yet self-reported clinical empathy has declined over the past decade. One hypothesized contributor to the ability of a nurse to be empathic is whether they can recognize emotion, a phenomenon thus far unstudied among nurses.

This cross-sectional study used online survey methods to collect data from 166 licensed nurses employed in one of 22 hospitals in Florida, USA. The Geneva Emotion Recognition Test-Short Form (GERT-SF) measured behavioral empathy-the ability to identify 7 positive and 7 negative basic emotions from non-language-based audiovisual clips with actors expressing these emotions. The Jefferson Scale of Empathy-Health Professionals measured self-reported clinical empathy in patient care. Demographic and work-related factors were assessed with investigator-designed items. Descriptive and bivariate statistical analyses were employed.

Although nurses self-reported very high clinical empathy, their ability to recognize emotions using the GERT-S tool was fair. Emotion recognition and clinical empathy were weakly correlated (r = 0.175, p = 0.024, 95 % CI = 0.02-0.32). The least recognized emotion for the participants to identify was anxiety. No demographic variables were associated with either emotion recognition or clinical empathy.

These findings expose how nurse perceptions of being empathic may poorly align with the ability to recognize a patient's emotional response. Thus, findings have implications for teaching empathy, as well as for how researchers validly and reliably measure these constructs.