ArticleBMJ open2020
Searching for the erosion of empathy in medical undergraduate students: a longitudinal study.
Article in BMJ open, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 22 citations in OpenAlex.
- Safeguarding medical empathy and cultivating compassion in contemporary medicine.Internal medicine journal · 2026Review
- Dimensions and temporal stability of medical students' motivation: longitudinal evidence from a panel data survey.BMC medical education · 2026Article
- Evaluation of the relationship between resilience and empathy in medical professionals using structural equation modeling.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Between scientific capital and emotional capital: a cross-sectional study on the empathetic clinical gaze in Swedish medical education.Frontiers in medicine · 2026Article
- Cognitive and behavioural empathy: are 4th and 6th medical students different?BMC medical education · 2025Article
- Integrating medical humanities in undergraduate medical education: a curricular model aligned with the InspirE5 framework.BMC medical education · 2025Article
- Empathy in undergraduate medical students: A multivariate cross-sectional study in China.PloS one · 2025Article
- Does Medical Curriculum Impact on Empathy? A Longitudinal Study in a Sample of Undergraduate Medical Students.Medical science educator · 2024Article
- Cognitive empathy variations during internship: a study from Iran.BMC medical education · 2024Article
- The Greek Jefferson Scale of Empathy-Medical Student Version (JSE-S): Psychometric Properties and Its Associated Factors.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Students' self-perception of empathy in caring.Curationis · 2023Article
- Parental care and depressive symptoms among Chinese medical students: roles of empathy and gender.BMC medical education · 2022Article
- Medical empathy in medical students in Madrid: A proposal for empathy level cut-off points for Spain.PloS one · 2022Article
- Empathy and Coping in Allied Health Sciences: Gender Patterns.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Emotional Intelligence, a Step Further on Empathy and Leadership Skills of Future Doctors: A Cross-Sectional Study on Undergraduate Medical Students of Pakistan.Journal of medical education and curricular developmentArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectiveTo analyse the trajectory of empathy throughout the degree programme of medicine in a Spanish school of medicine.
designLongitudinal, prospective 5-year study, between October 2014 and June 2019.
settingStudents from a Spanish university of medicine.
participantsTwo voluntary cohorts of undergraduate medical students from two different school years were invited to participate (n=135 (cohort 1, C1) and 106 (cohort 2, C2) per school year). Finally, a total number of 174 students (102 (C1, 71.6% women) and 72 (C2, 70.8% women) students, respectively) were monitored for 5 years. Each cohort was divided in two subcohorts of paired and unpaired students that were analysed to check possible social desirability bias. PRIMARY OUTCOME MEASURE: The Jefferson Scale of Empathy (JSE).
resultsThe cohort of 102 students (C1) monitored between their first and fifth years of study (71.6% women) showed an improvement among paired women of 2.15 points in total JSE score (p=0.01) and 2.39 points in cognitive empathy (p=0.01); in the unpaired female cohort the increase was of 2.32 points (cognitive empathy) (p=0.02). The cohort of 72 students (C2) monitored between their second and sixth years of study (70.8% women) displayed a cognitive empathy increase of 2.32 points (p=0.04) in the paired group of women. There were no significant differences between paired and unpaired results for either cohort. Empathy scores among men did not decrease.
conclusionsThe empathy of medical students at our school did not decline along grade years. In fact, it improved slightly, particularly cognitive empathy, among women. This paper contributes to enlarge data from Europe, where longitudinal studies are scarce. It supports the idea that there may be global geo-sociocultural differences; however, more studies comparing different school settings are needed.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.