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Associations of Physician Empathy with Patient Anxiety and Ratings of Communication in Hospital Admission Encounters
Author(s) -
Weiss Rachel,
Vittinghoff Eric,
Fang Margaret C.,
Cimino Jenica E. W.,
Chasteen Kristen Adams,
Arnold Robert M.,
Auerbach Andrew D.,
Anderson Wendy G.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
journal of hospital medicine
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.128
H-Index - 65
eISSN - 1553-5606
pISSN - 1553-5592
DOI - 10.12788/jhm.2828
Subject(s) - empathy , anxiety , medicine , poisson regression , feeling , association (psychology) , confidence interval , clinical psychology , scale (ratio) , family medicine , psychiatry , psychology , social psychology , psychotherapist , population , physics , environmental health , quantum mechanics
BACKGROUND Responding empathically when patients express negative emotion is a recommended component of patient‐centered communication. OBJECTIVE To assess the association between the frequency of empathic physician responses with patient anxiety, ratings of communication, and encounter length during hospital admission encounters. DESIGN Analysis of coded audio‐recorded hospital admission encounters and pre‐ and postencounter patient survey data. SETTING Two academic hospitals. PARTICIPANTS Seventy‐six patients admitted by 27 attending hospitalist physicians. MEASUREMENTS Recordings were transcribed and analyzed by trained coders, who counted the number of empathic, neutral, and nonempathic verbal responses by hospitalists to their patients' expressions of negative emotion. We developed multivariable linear regression models to test the association between the number of these responses and the change in patients' State Anxiety Scale (STAI‐S) score pre‐ and postencounter and encounter length. We used Poisson regression models to examine the association between empathic response frequency and patient ratings of the encounter. RESULTS Each additional empathic response from a physician was associated with a 1.65‐point decline in the STAI‐S anxiety scale (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.48‐2.82). Frequency of empathic responses was associated with improved patient ratings for covering points of interest, feeling listened to and cared about, and trusting the doctor. The number of empathic responses was not associated with encounter length (percent change in encounter length per response 1%; 95% CI, ‐8%‐10%). CONCLUSIONS Responding empathically when patients express negative emotion was associated with less patient anxiety and higher ratings of communication but not longer encounter length.