title: What is clinical empathy?
abstract: Patients seek empathy from their physicians. Medical educators increasingly recognize this need. Yet in seeking to make empathy a reliable professional skill, doctors change the meaning of the term. Outside the field of medicine, empathy is a mode of understanding that specifically involves emotional resonance. In contrast, leading physician educators define empathy as a form of detached cognition. In contrast, this article argues that physicians' emotional attunement greatly serves the cognitive goal of understanding patients' emotions. This has important implications for teaching empathy.
authors.affiliation: Division of Health and Medical Sciences, University of California, Berkeley-Berkeley, Calif 94720-1190, USA. jhalpern@socrates.berkeley.edu
authors.forename: Jodi
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Halpern
mesh_terms: D004644:Emotions / Q000941:ethics*; D004645:Empathy; D026690:Ethics, Clinical; D006801:Humans; D010817:Physician-Patient Relations / Q000941:ethics*