Trajectories of medical students' empathy nowadays: a longitudinal study using a comprehensive framework of empathy

For more than a decade, the literature has been dominated by the notion that medical students may paradoxically lose their empathy during medical school. However, medical curricula have significantly evolved, and the question is whether this is still the case. The present study aimed to describe the trajectories of different dimensions of empathy from the beginning to the end of a six-year medical curriculum and explore the influence of different psychosocial and health-related factors.

In an open cohort design, all medical students at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) were invited to complete four waves of yearly online questionnaires. Cognitive, affective, and behavioral empathy were measured with three validated instruments, and emotion recognition was assessed with a performance test. For each measure, linear mixed models including an array of psychosocial and health-related potential covariates were modelled. Different temporal variance-covariance structures and nonlinear trajectories were tested.

The final sample included 3224 questionnaires completed by 1667 medical students. The cognitive and affective dimensions of empathy significantly increased in the first half of medical school, followed by a plateau, whereas behavioral empathy remained stable. For emotion recognition, a significant linear increase was observed. The only covariate with substantial influence was gender: students identifying as male presented similar trajectories of empathy and emotion recognition but with overall lower scores than students identifying as female or nonbinary.

This study revealed significant increases in cognitive empathy, affective empathy, and emotion recognition. Developments in today's medical curricula may have contributed to the observed increase in empathy. Future multisite studies are warranted to identify the features of the educational environment that impact the trajectories of empathy during medical school.