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X Demographics
Mendeley readers
Attention Score in Context
| Title |
Why empathy has a beneficial impact on others in medicine: unifying theories
|
|---|---|
| Published in |
Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, January 2015
|
| DOI | 10.3389/fnbeh.2014.00457 |
| Pubmed ID | |
| Authors |
Jean Decety, Aikaterini Fotopoulou |
| Abstract |
The past decades have seen an explosion of studies on empathy in various academic domains including affective neuroscience, psychology, medicine, and economics. However, the volumes of research have almost exclusively focused on its evolutionary origins, development, and neurobiological bases, as well as how the experience of empathy is modulated by social context and interpersonal relationships. In the present paper, we examine a much less attended side of empathy: why it has a positive impact on others? After specifying what the construct of empathy encompasses, we briefly review the various effects of empathy on health outcomes in the domain of medicine. We then propose two non-mutually exclusive mechanistic explanations that contribute to explain the positive effects of physician empathy on patients. (1) The social baseline theory (SBT), building on social support research, proposes that the presence of other people helps individuals to conserve metabolically costly somatic and neural resources through the social regulation of emotion. (2) The free energy principle (FEP) postulates that the brain optimizes a (free energy) bound on surprise or its complement value to respond to environmental changes adaptively. These conceptualizations can be combined to provide a unifying integrative account of the benefits of physicians' empathetic attitude on their patients and how it plays a role in healing beyond the mere effect of the therapeutic alliance. |
X Demographics
The data shown below were collected from the profiles of 43 X users who shared this research output. Click here to find out more about how the information was compiled.
Geographical breakdown
| Country | Count | As % |
|---|---|---|
| United States | 11 | 26% |
| Spain | 4 | 9% |
| Canada | 4 | 9% |
| Australia | 2 | 5% |
| United Kingdom | 2 | 5% |
| Norway | 1 | 2% |
| Netherlands | 1 | 2% |
| Mexico | 1 | 2% |
| Switzerland | 1 | 2% |
| Other | 0 | 0% |
| Unknown | 16 | 37% |
Demographic breakdown
| Type | Count | As % |
|---|---|---|
| Members of the public | 32 | 74% |
| Scientists | 8 | 19% |
| Practitioners (doctors, other healthcare professionals) | 2 | 5% |
| Science communicators (journalists, bloggers, editors) | 1 | 2% |
Mendeley readers
The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 432 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.
Geographical breakdown
| Country | Count | As % |
|---|---|---|
| United States | 4 | <1% |
| France | 2 | <1% |
| Brazil | 1 | <1% |
| Russia | 1 | <1% |
| United Kingdom | 1 | <1% |
| Spain | 1 | <1% |
| Poland | 1 | <1% |
| Unknown | 421 | 97% |
Demographic breakdown
| Readers by professional status | Count | As % |
|---|---|---|
| Student > Bachelor | 83 | 19% |
| Student > Ph. D. Student | 49 | 11% |
| Student > Master | 49 | 11% |
| Student > Doctoral Student | 37 | 9% |
| Researcher | 32 | 7% |
| Other | 75 | 17% |
| Unknown | 107 | 25% |
| Readers by discipline | Count | As % |
|---|---|---|
| Psychology | 129 | 30% |
| Medicine and Dentistry | 77 | 18% |
| Nursing and Health Professions | 35 | 8% |
| Agricultural and Biological Sciences | 12 | 3% |
| Social Sciences | 9 | 2% |
| Other | 50 | 12% |
| Unknown | 120 | 28% |
Attention Score in Context
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 132. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 17 January 2024.
All research outputs
#317,304
of 25,503,365 outputs
Outputs from Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
#59
of 3,473 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#3,743
of 361,658 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
#2
of 72 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 25,503,365 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 98th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 3,473 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 12.7. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 98% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 361,658 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 98% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 72 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 98% of its contemporaries.