Meditation and Student Empathy

Not Applicable

Completed

• Conditions: Empathy; Stress
• Interventions: Behavioral: Meditation

• Registration Number: NCT03330665
• Lead Sponsor: New York Institute of Technology

Brief Summary

Physician empathy and reducing stress are major factors in attaining positive clinical outcomes for patients. Fostering empathy in medical students is particularly important as they are the future of the healthcare workforce and a trend of declining empathy during medical education may lead to decreased health care quality outcomes. Meditation may be an avenue to promote positive student attitudes including empathy, though very few studies have examined this idea through empirical research. Using validated measures, the Jefferson scale of empathy and the perceived stress scale, we seek to investigate whether use of a meditation app will be associated with higher levels of self-rated empathy and lower self-rated stress.

Detailed Description

Not available

Study Timeline

• Study Start: 2016-11-01
• Study First Submitted: 2017-10-31
• Study First Submitted QC: 2017-10-31
• Study First Posted: 2017-11-06
• Primary Completion: 2020-09-01
• Study Completion: 2021-09-07
• Status Verified: 2022-02
• Last Update Submitted: 2022-02-16
• Last Update Posted: 2022-02-18

Recruitment & Eligibility

• Status: COMPLETED
• Sex: All
• Target Recruitment: 78

Inclusion Criteria

-Medical students from New York Institute of Technology

Exclusion Criteria

-Not a medical student

Study & Design

• Study Type: INTERVENTIONAL
• Study Design: PARALLEL

Arm && Interventions

Group	Intervention	Description
Intervention	Meditation	Meditate using headspace app 3 times a week

Primary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
Perceived stress scale (PSS)	6 months	Perceived stress scale measures stress levels. 10 item scale where subjects are asked to indicate by circling how often they felt or thought a certain way on a scale of 1-4. Items are them added up- a higher score means higher stress.
Jefferson scale of empathy	6 months	Jefferson scale of Empathy measures empathy levels. 20 item scale where subjects are asked to indicate by circling how often they felt or thought a certain way about empathy related situations on a scale of 1-7. Items are them added up- a higher score means higher empathy.