Empathy Flashcards
What is empathy?
- A dimension of sensory perception and a way of knowing that organizes sense data into meaningful understanding
- Facilitates awareness of self and others
- Responds to hidden message/acknowledges underlying feelings
- Adding significantly to message
- Caregiver remains objective
What is sympathy?
- Emphasizes sharing distressing feelings
- Involves agreeing with some aspects of the other’s feelings
- Share own experiences- often negative
- Sympathy has a component of acceptance of the other’s situation – more sympathetic when the nurse agrees with the patient’s comments
- Loss of helper’s objectivity
- Tendency to focus on self , not on pt.
- Tendency to feel sorry for pt.
What are the three dimensions of empathy?
1) Perceptiveness
2) Know-how
3) Assertiveness
What are four components of empathetic responses?
1) Active listening
2) Response
3) Validation
4) Active communication skills
Compare and contrast sympathy and empathy:
- Less active listening vs. more active listening
- Often tunes into only aspects caregiver agrees with vs. non-judgmental, focus on understanding the patient’s viewpoint
- May hinge on caregiver’s judging/evaluating pt according to own feelings/beliefs vs. keeping own personal feelings out of dialogue to maintain a professional perspective
- Sharing own distressing feelings vs. shares whatever feelings pt expresses but maintains own therapeutic sense of self
- Caregiver not in the moment vs. caregiver in the moment
What are the benefits of empathy?
- Builds a trusting relationship
- Stimulates the patient’s self-exploration
- Provides support, patient feeling valued
- Keeps helper focused on patient’s thoughts and feelings
- Restrains helper from asking too many questions or jumping in with advice
What are barriers to empathetic responses?
- Lack of knowledge
- Lack of time
- Lack of trust
- Lack of privacy
- Lack of support from colleagues
How can we effective in empathy?
- Time to think
- Short responses
- Gear yourself to the client, but be yourself
How can we be ineffective in empathy?
- No response
- Ask questions
- Clichés
- Interpretations
- Advice giving
- Faking it
- Parroting only
Describe the four levels of empathy:
1) Unawareness of individuals message or feelings
2) Superficial acknowledgement of individuals message
3) Recognition of individuals message and some feelings
4) Acknowledgement of message and obvious feelings
Describe level one empathy:
- Nurse is not listening, understanding or being sensitive
- May be detracting significantly from message
- Ex. saying that “that’s the way the cookie crumbles, at least i’m having a good day” after a patient’s wife had a heart attack
Describe level two empathy:
- May partially recognize the experience/feelings of individual, but in a way that subtracts from what the person is sharing, distorting the meaning
- Ex. “that is pretty bad all right, but i guess we all have our difficult days”
Describe level three empathy:
- What nurse says is virtually interchangeable with individual, expressing same content and feeling; minimally facilitation, does not add or subtract from person
- Does not connect with how person feels deeply, but demonstrates willingness to do so
Describe level four empathy:
Nurse adds noticeably to what person has said in a way that identifies feelings at a deeper level and leads to discover deeper meanings
