Journal of Advanced Nursing
Journal of Advanced Nursing
5 years ago

Empathy in paediatric intensive care nurses part 2: Neural correlates

Pierre-Emmanuel Michon, Etienne Vachon-Presseau, Fanny Eugène, Margot Latimer, Kenneth M. Prkachin, Tara Hatfield, Emily MacLeod, Philip L. Jackson
Aims To determine if there are brain activity differences between paediatric intensive care nurses and allied health professionals during pain intensity rating tasks and test whether these differences are related to the population observed (infant or adult) and professional experience. Background The underestimation of patients’ pain by healthcare professionals has generally been associated with patterns of change in neural response to vicarious pain, notably reduced activation in regions associated with affective sharing and increased activation in regions associated with regulation, compared with controls. Paediatric nurses, however, have recently been found to provide higher estimates of infants’ pain in comparison to allied health controls, suggesting that changes in neural response of this population might be different than other health professionals. Design Cross-sectional study. Methods Functional MRI data were acquired from September 2014–June 2015 and used to compare changes in brain activity in 27 female paediatric care nurses and 24 allied health professionals while rating the pain of infants and adults in a series of video clips. Results Paediatric nurses rated infant and adult pain higher than allied health professionals, but the two groups’ neural response only differed during observation of infant pain; paediatric nurses mainly showed significantly less activation in the medial prefrontal cortex (linked to cognitive empathy) and in the left anterior insula and inferior frontal cortex (linked to affective sharing). Conclusions Patterns of neural activity to vicarious pain may vary across healthcare professions and patient populations and the amount of professional experience might explain part of these differences.

Publisher URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi

DOI: 10.1111/jan.13334

You might also like
Discover & Discuss Important Research

Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.

  • Download from Google Play
  • Download from App Store
  • Download from AppInChina

Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.