Relationship between Supportive Supervision and Empathic Behavior among Public Healthcare Professionals

Purpose: The study explored the relationship between supportive supervision and empathic behavior and the indirect effect of occupational self-efficacy (OSE) among healthcare professionals in public hospitals in Delta State, Nigeria. Design/Methodology: The study is a quantitative cross-sectional survey, and the correlational design was adopted. Through convenience and systematic sampling, data were obtained from 127 healthcare professionals (doctors and nurses) from public hospitals. The sample consisted of 127 healthcare professionals with a mean age of 33.91 (SD, 5.64). Regression analysis via Model 4 of Hayes' PROCESS Macro was used to analyze the direct and indirect effect model with the help of the IBM-SPSS version 23. Findings: The study's findings indicated that supportive supervision and OSE positively and significantly predicted empathic behavior among healthcare professionals. The results further indicated that OSE mediated the relationship between supportive supervision and empathic behavior. Practical Implications: Based on the research findings, it is recommended that public healthcare administrators and managers should ensure that employees who handle direct patient care in public hospitals receive enough training in enhancing their skills, professional development and provided with enough supportive supervision in the workplace to foster empathic concern for their patients. Originality/Value: The research findings enhance and add new knowledge to the empathic behavior literature by investigating supportive supervision and OSE as predictors and checking for the mediating role of OSE.

Satisfaction level of patients visiting orthopedics wards - A descriptive cross-sectional study

Introduction: Patients in the orthopedics ward are very anxious about the outcome of their illness and residual morbidity at the end of the treatment. We conducted this study in DHQ Teaching Hospital Sahiwal to assess the level of satisfaction among patients visiting the orthopedics ward and suggest improvements that could be made to improve the situation.Objective: The objective of this study was to investigate various factors responsible for patient satisfaction in the orthopedics ward.Materials and Methods: A total of hundred patients were included in this descriptive cross-sectional study. The study was conducted in DHQ Teaching Hospital Sahiwal for 3 months from October 2019 to December 2019.Results: Out of the 100 patients included in the study, 22 patients reported being unsatisfied with their ward experience, 46 patients were moderately satisfied while 32 patients were highly satisfied with ward experience. Several factors including increased consultation duration, cost-effective treatment, empathic behavior of staff, and provision of facilities in the ward all contributed towards positive patient satisfaction.Conclusions: Patient satisfaction can be improved by empathic behavior of staff, increasing consultation duration with the patient, and improving facilities in the ward which would result in the better long-term outcome of their illness.

Adaptive empathy: A model for learning empathic responses based on feedback

Empathy is usually deployed in social interactions. Nevertheless, common measures and examinations of empathy study this construct in isolation from the person in distress. In this paper we seek to extend the field of examination to include both empathizer and target in order to determine whether and how empathic responses are affected by feedback and learned through interaction. Building on computational approaches in feedback-based adaptations (e.g., no feedback, model-free and model-based learning), we propose a framework for understanding how empathic responses are learned based on feedback. In this framework, adaptive empathy, defined as the ability to adapt one’s empathic responses, is a central aspect of empathic skills, and can provide a new dimension to the evaluation and investigation of empathy. By extending existing neural models of empathy, we suggest that adaptive empathy may be mediated by interactions between the neural circuits associated with valuation, shared distress, observation-execution and mentalizing. Finally, we propose that adaptive empathy should be considered as a prominent facet of empathic capabilities with the potential to explain empathic behavior in health and in psychopathology.

No preference for prosocial ‘helping’ behavior in rats with concurrent social interaction opportunities

Abstract‘Helping behavior’ tasks are proposed to assess prosocial or ‘empathic’ behavior in rodents. This paradigm characterizes the behavior of subject animals presented with the opportunity to release a conspecific from a distressing situation. Previous studies found a preference in rats for releasing restrained or distressed conspecifics over other controls (e.g., empty restrainers or inanimate objects). An empathy account was offered to explain the observed behaviors, claiming subjects were motivated to reduce the distress of others based on a rodent homologue of empathy. An opposing account attributes all previous results to subjects seeking social-contact. To dissociate these two accounts for helping behavior, we presented subject rats with three simultaneous choice alternatives: releasing a restrained conspecific, engaging a non-restrained conspecific, or not socializing. Subjects showed an initial preference for socializing with the non-restrained conspecific, and no preference for helping. This result contradicts the empathy account, but is consistent with the social-contact account of helping behavior.

Preschoolers’ sensitivity to emotional facial expressions and their repetition: An ERP study

This study aimed to expand the understanding of the neural-temporal trajectories ofemotion processing in preschoolers using electrophysiological measures. In particular, welooked at neural responses to the repetition of emotional faces. EEG was recorded whilechildren observed sequentially presented pairs of faces. In some trials, the pair of faces wasidentical, while in others they differed with regards to the emotional expression displayed(happy, fearful or neutral). We detected greater P1 and P3 amplitudes to angry compared toneutral facial expressions, but similar amplitudes for happy compared to neutral faces. Wedid not observe modulations of the N170 by emotional facial expressions. When investigatingpreschoolers’ sensitivity to the repetition of emotional facial expressions, we found no ERPamplitudes differences for repeated vs. new emotional facial expressions. Overall, the resultssupport the idea that basic mechanisms of emotion processing are developed in preschoolperiod. The trajectory of ERP components was similar to what has been reported foryounger and older age groups, suggesting consistency of order and relative timing of differentstages of emotion processing. Additionally, findings suggest that enhanced early neuralactivation for angry vs. neutral faces is related to increased empathic behavior. More work isneeded to determine whether the repetition of an emotion leads to more effective processingduring development.