Trial reportBritish journal of health psychology2025
Is compassion fatigue a self-fulfilling prophecy in health care? A preregistered experimental study of manipulated expectations in doctors and medical trainees.
Trial report in British journal of health psychology, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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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
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Is compassion fatigue a self-fulfilling prophecy in health care? A preregistered experimental study of manipulated expectations in doctors and medical trainees.British journal of health psychology · 2025Trial
- A feasibility study of an Evidence-informed, Competency-based, Accredited, Compassion Training (EnACT) program.BMC medical education · 2026Article
- Development of ICU nurses' compassion fatigue classification model: an explainable machine learning algorithm.BMC nursing · 2026Article
- Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway-Beliefs About Compassion Predict Care and Motivation to Help Among Healthcare Professionals.Journal of clinical nursing · 2025Observational
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
objectivesTo test the possibility that narratives regarding compassion as tiring (compassion fatigue) in health care represent a form of self-fulfilling prophecy by experimentally testing whether perceptions of compassion can be manipulated and whether such manipulations change ratings of compassion toward hypothetical patients.
designPreregistered experimental study of medical practitioners and trainee doctors conducted anonymously and online using a mixed between-groups and repeated within-person design.
methodsNew Zealand doctors and medical trainees were randomized to watch a video positioning compassion as positive or negative (or a control video). Perceptions of compassion were rated before and after the manipulation, before participants rated standardized vignettes depicting patients who systematically varied in terms of presentation and responsibility for condition. Data were analysed using factorial analysis of variance (ANOVA).
resultsFactorial ANOVA revealed that perceptions of compassion were influenced by the video manipulation but group differences in ratings of care, compassion, and desire to help hypothetical patients were not found. Patient presentation and responsibility manipulations showed large effects and there was evidence for the influence of social desirability.
conclusionsThis study provides 'proof of principle' that perceptions of compassion are malleable lending support to the possibility that a focus on compassion fatigue may be contributing to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Perceptions of compassion were readily altered following a short video intervention. While group differences in responses to hypothetical patients were not seen, the findings (particularly the large effect of patient factors) support the view that multiple factors contribute to the emergence of compassion in health care.
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Registered trials
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