The DOI matches its Crossref record; 14 of the 14 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The Science of Empathy
Open accessAbstract
Empathy plays a critical interpersonal and societal role, enabling sharing of experiences, needs, and desires between individuals and providing an emotional bridge that promotes pro-social behavior. This capacity requires an exquisite interplay of neural networks and enables us to perceive the emotions of others, resonate with them emotionally and cognitively, to take in the perspective of others, and to distinguish between our own and others’ emotions. Studies show empathy declines during medical training. Without targeted interventions, uncompassionate care and treatment devoid of empathy, results in patients who are dissatisfied. They are then much less likely to follow through with treatment recommendations, resulting in poorer health outcomes and damaged trust in health providers. Cognitive empathy must play a role when a lack of emotional empathy exists because of racial, ethnic, religious, or physical differences. Healthcare settings are no exception to conscious and unconscious biases, and there is no place for discrimination or unequal care afforded to patients who differ from the majority culture or the majority culture of healthcare providers. Much work lies ahead to make healthcare equitable for givers and receivers of healthcare from all cultures. Self- and other-empathy leads to replenishment and renewal of a vital human capacity. If we are to move in the direction of a more empathic society and a more compassionate world, it is clear that working to enhance our native capacities to empathize is critical to strengthening individual, community, national, and international bonds.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
The functional architecture of human empathy
Decety, J., & Jackson, P. L. (2004) · Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews · doi:10.1177/1534582304267187 · Cited by 3,407 · cited 1×
“Differences in these neural processes may account for different individual capacities for empathy (13).”
BackgroundNeural mechanisms of empathy in humans: a relay from neural systems for imitation to limbic areas
Carr, L., Iacoboni, M., Dubeau, M.-C., Mazziotta, J. C., & Lenzi, G. L. (2003) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.0935845100 · Cited by 1,978
The Devil is in the Third Year: A Longitudinal Study of Erosion of Empathy in Medical School
Hojat, M., Vergare, M. J., Maxwell, K., Brainard, G., Herrine, S. K., Isenberg, G. A., Veloski, J., & Gonnella, J. S. (2009) · Academic Medicine · doi:10.1097/acm.0b013e3181b17e55 · Cited by 1,628
Transcranial magnetic stimulation highlights the sensorimotor side of empathy for pain.
Avenanti, A., Bueti, D., Galati, G., & Aglioti, S. M. (2005) · Nature Neuroscience · doi:10.1038/nn1481 · Cited by 615
An additional antecedent of empathic concern: Valuing the welfare of the person in need.
Batson, C. D., Eklund, J. H., Chermok, V. L., Hoyt, J. L., & Ortiz, B. G. (2007) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/0022-3514.93.1.65 · Cited by 587
Communication skills training for physicians improves patient satisfaction
Boissy, A., Windover, A. K., Bokar, D., Karafa, M., Neuendorf, K., Frankel, R. M., Merlino, J., & Rothberg, M. B. (2016) · Journal of General Internal Medicine · doi:10.1007/s11606-016-3597-2 · Cited by 561
Riess, H., Kelley, J. M., Bailey, R. W., Dunn, E. J., & Phillips, M. (2012) · Journal of General Internal Medicine · doi:10.1007/s11606-012-2063-z · Cited by 404
Self-citationNunes, P., Williams, S., Sa, B., & Stevenson, K. (2011) · International Journal of Medical Education · doi:10.5116/ijme.4d47.ddb0 · Cited by 332
The Sight of Others' Pain Modulates Motor Processing in Human Cingulate Cortex
Morrison, I., Peelen, M. V., & Downing, P. E. (2006) · Cerebral Cortex · doi:10.1093/cercor/bhl129 · Cited by 151
Empathy in Medicine—A Neurobiological Perspective
Riess, H. (2010) · JAMA · doi:10.1001/jama.2010.1455 · Cited by 137
Self-citation
Cited by
Sharma, A., Lin, I. W., Miner, A. S., Atkins, D. C., & Althoff, T. (2023) · Nature Machine Intelligence · doi:10.1038/s42256-022-00593-2 · Cited by 500
Taylor, B. A., LeBlanc, L. A., & Nosik, M. R. (2019) · Behavior Analysis in Practice · doi:10.1007/s40617-018-00289-3 · Cited by 258
Brandt, C. J., Søgaard, G. I., Clemensen, J., Søndergaard, J., & Nielsen, J. B. (2018) · Journal of Medical Internet Research · doi:10.2196/jmir.9791 · Cited by 57
Developing relational empathy in virtual ethnographic intercultural teaching
Zhou, Y., Calloway-Thomas, C., Li, G., & Zhang, X. (2025) · Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics · doi:10.1515/cjal-2025-0109 · Cited by 1
Chang, K.-F., Yang, W.-G., Cheng, Y.-W., & Shih, I.-T. (2022) · International Journal of Mental Health Promotion · doi:10.32604/ijmhp.2022.018187
Metadata
- Authors
- Riess, H.
- Venue
- Journal of Patient Experience
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2017-05-09
- Volume
- 4
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 74-77
- ISSN
- 2374-3735 (ISSN-L)
- 2374-3743
- OpenAlex
- W2612425534
- Cited by
- 458
- References
- 14
- FWCI
- 14.15
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Science of Empathy. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1177/2374373517699267
- The paper
- Riess, H. (2017). The Science of Empathy. Journal of Patient Experience. https://doi.org/10.1177/2374373517699267
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
