Empathy among first year university students: A cross-sectional analytical study

This study aimed to compare empathy levels among first-year students beginning different health-related programmes (medicine-dentistry, physiotherapy, psychology, veterinary medicine) and to compare them to students in non-health-related programmes. A secondary objective was to identify factors influencing.

First-year students from a variety of academic fields, recruited from three different universities at the very beginning of their academic year, participated in the study. An anonymous online questionnaire was administered, including sociodemographic data, the Interpersonal Responsiveness Index (IRI) and for students enrolled in health-related programmes, the Jefferson Scale of Empathy for Health Professionals (JSPE-HPS). Incomplete questionnaires were excluded. The Spearman and Pearson correlations examined the relationships between self-report items and IRI and JSPE-HPS scores, respectively. Parametric ANOVAs compared empathy scores between groups.

A total of 1787 responses were analyzed, 1132 women, 600 men and 11 non-binary people, the average age of the respondents was 18.78 years (s-d 2.51). Students in the psychology curriculum had significantly higher total IRI scores than those in non-health fields (p < 0.001). Among health students, those in psychology, medicine, and dentistry scored higher IRI and Jefferson scores than physical therapy students (p < 0.001). The regression models identified gender, field of study, and communication training as significant predictors, although these explained only a small portion of the variance in the scores.

The results highlight the existence of significant differences in empathy levels by field of study, with empathy particularly high among mental health students and lower among physiotherapy and non-health students. While certain factors such as gender, age, and communication training influence these levels, other variables, such as personality traits or emotional regulation, are worth exploring. These observations argue for the integration, from the first year, of educational programmes that promote the development of empathy, particularly in fields where it seems to be less present.