Relationship between empathy and burnout among psychiatric residents

*Emőke Fülöp¹, Ágnes Devecsery², Katalin Hausz³, Zsuzsanna Kovács¹, Márta Csabai⁴

Summary
Aim. To study the causal factors of empathy and burnout and the effect of emotional involvement on medical doctors.
Material and methods. Descriptive study at 4 Hungarian medical faculties with 67 psychiatry residents. Instruments: Maslach Burnout Inventory (Maslach and Jackson, 1986), Interpersonal Reactivity Index (Davis, 1980), Patient-Practitioner Orientation Scale (Krupat, E. et al. 2000), and Secondary Traumatic Stress Scale (Bride 2003). Statistics: Spearman correlation, Kruskal-Wallis test, Mann-Whitney U test, factor analysis with Varimax rotation.
Results. High emotional exhaustion among 32.8% of residents, high level of depersonalization of 29.9%, decrease of personal effectiveness of 52.2%. Significantly higher depersonalization for men (p ≤ 0.05). Significantly more subjective experience of symptoms of arousal for women than men (p = 0.028). Empathic distress (Interpersonal Reactivity Index) is accompanied by emotional exhaustion (p < 0.001), reduced personal accomplishment (p < 0.001), and each symptom of secondary trauma (p < 0.001). Emotional exhaustion correlates with all three symptoms of secondary trauma (p < 0.001).
Factor analysis of the questionnaires revealed two main factors: the first factor we named “reactive empathy” or “mentalization”. The second factor included components related to emotional contagion and its consequence, burnout.
Conclusions. Experience of emotional contagion may predict the manifestation of burnout. Regulation of the intensity of emotional states, perspective change and empathic concern determine that form of empathy which has a positive effect on both the patient and the therapist.

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