Emotion recognition and clinical empathy: An observational study of nurses

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

Background: 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.

Methods: 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.

Results: 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.

Conclusions: 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.