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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Background: Empathy is essential to medical practice, and efforts to cultivate it often include incorporating liberal arts into medical curricula to promote it. However, the association between empathy and engagement in artistic practice beyond the medical curricula remains unclear. This study aims to assess the association between medical students´ empathy and their engagement in artistic activities.
Methods: Students enrolled at 11 Portuguese medical schools were invited to participate in an online survey. The survey included questions about their artistic practice, and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) to measure empathy.
Results: A total of 450 medical students completed the survey. 158 students (35%) were actively engaged in the arts, 118 of which practiced music (75%). Participants involved in artistic activities demonstrated significantly higher scores in the Fantasy subscale compared to their peers. Participants engaged in multiple artistic activities scored significantly higher in overall IRI, as well as in Empathic Concern and Fantasy subscales, compared to those practicing only one artistic activity. Participants who began their artistic practice earlier tended to achieve higher scores in overall IRI and on the Empathic Concern subscale.
Conclusions: The present study highlights a significant positive association between artistic practice and empathy levels among medical students. Further research is recommended to clarify this association, potentially informing revisions to medical school curricula.
Keywords: ; ; Medical students.
Description
© The Author(s) 2024. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Keywords
Art Empathy Medical students
Pedagogical Context
Citation
BMC Med Educ. 2024 Oct 16;24(1):1156
Publisher
Springer Nature