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Defining the line : examining the role of empathy in the prosocial treatment of pain

University of British Columbia

Pain has been identified as the most common reason for seeking medical care in emergency departments and yet has been found to be left widely undertreated. The pervasiveness of these visits, combined with the undertreatment of pain, can have detrimental consequences for patients and providers. As such, there is a pressing need to identify factors associated with effective pain treatment. A factor consistently found to motivate helping behaviour is personal distress; however, the intricacies of this relationship remain unclear. Specifically, willingness to help patients in pain has been linked to both high and low levels of personal distress. This dissertation aimed to clarify the nature of this relationship and to explore the potential moderating influence of both individual (i.e., third-person pain perception, emotion regulation, and psychopathic traits) and situational (i.e., cost of helping) factors. Two studies were conducted in which undergraduate students and medical students completed a prosocial task where they were asked to indicate how much time they wished to spend helping patients in pain. Overall, personal distress did not emerge as a significant predictor of helping behaviour, and this relationship was not moderated by the personal cost of helping (i.e., type of remuneration). Support was found, however, for the moderating role of individual traits. Specifically, Studies 1 and 2 identified three distinct emotional processing profiles: Sensitive Responders, Indifferent Responders, and Insensitive Responders. Moreover, these profiles were found to be differently related to prosocial behaviour. Overall, findings suggest that individual differences in emotional processing may moderate the relationship between empathy and prosocial behaviour, potentially contributing to disparities in the treatment of pain. Additionally, these findings highlight the importance of considering these traits simultaneously, as opposed to examining these variables in isolation.

Text

2020-08-14

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/75513

Psychology

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/