Morgan D Stosic et al, “Empathy, Friend or Foe? Untangling the Relationship between Empathy and Burnout in Helping Professions”

This article examines the relationship between empathy and burnout by exploring empathy across various samples of helping professions which include practicing clinicians, medical students, and teaching assistants.

Empathy can be viewed through a cognitive lens and an affective lens. The former includes perception and understand of another person’s emotional state. These cognitive aspects of empathy are often viewed through a lens of accuracy within the helping professions because of the reliance on the individual whom the individual interacting with feeling understood and respected. On the other hand, affective empathy is described as one’s emotional response to the experiences of others.

Like empathy, burnout is multifaceted, and has been described as the cumulation of psychological experiences of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a reduced feeling of personal accomplishment (Maslach, 1993). Emotional exhaustion refers to “feelings of emotionally overextended and depleted of one’s emotional resources”. Depersonalization refers to “a negative, callous, or excessive detached response to other people, who are usually the recipients of one’s service or care”. Whereas, reduced personal accomplishment refers to “a decline in one’s feelings of competence and successful achievement in one’s work”. There are two facets to burnout: secondary traumatic stress, the distress and emotional disruption felt when one encounters an individual who has experiences a traumatic event, and reduced compassion satisfaction which refers to the loss of satisfaction in one’s work that is the direct consequence of helping others. Research has indicted that students of more burned-out teachers report feeling less supported and become less motivated (Shen et al., 2015).

The research indicated a clear pattern, across all sample groups, that the tendency to share in the positive emotions of others (positive empathy), the less likely individuals are to report experiencing symptoms of burnout. This relationship exists above and beyond factors including age, sex, race, general optimism, etc.

Burnout has negative effects on personal, professional, and organizational outcomes. The authors suggest several interventions to decrease burnout in the helping professions. These include: incorporating training and interventions aimed at increasing the sharing and responsivity to positive emotions of helpees, utilize assessment measures to explore one’s positive empathy and thus, potential for burnout before it occurs, and incorporate training focused on increasing helper’s ability to accurately perceive and understand individuals feeling because it does not contribute to negative emotion responses which may lead to burnout on behalf of the provider but, rather refocuses individuals attention towards prosocial behaviors aimed at alleviating the suffering of individuals in need.

Morgan D Stosic et al, “Empathy, Friend or Foe? Untangling the Relationship between Empathy and Burnout in Helping Professions” (2022) 162:1 J Social Psychology 89. Available on ResearchGate.