Benefits of emotional intelligence and its implications for health intervention: empathy and personality traits of nurses
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Abstract
We have witnessed several debates on humanitarian skills in nursing, such as:
caring, compassion and empathy. The reflection on whether these competences integrate personality traits or whether they can be taught and trained remains open. There is also an interest on the part of nursing teaching professionals on how to develop these skills in students. Thus, it is essential to identify the state of expression of these competencies in health professionals. We conducted an exploratory, cross-sectional, descriptive, correlational and inferential study, with the objective of identifying the nurses’ levels of empathy and personality traits; and, relationships between socio-professional variables and the dimensions under study, in a sample of 232 nurses: 186 (80.2%) were female; 149 (64.5%) with more than five years of service. An online questionnaire was used, consisting of socio-professional issues; the Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy; and the Big-Five Inventory (BFI-44). We found that nurses have high levels in the three dimensions of empathy: compassion, the patient’s perspective and putting themselves in the patient’s shoes. In the personality traits, the scores are above average for extroversion, kindness, conscientiousness and openness, with the exception of the neuroticism dimension where the average score is relatively low. Positive, moderate and statistically significant correlations were found between the dimensions: taking the patient’s perspective; extroversion; kindness; conscientiousness; and openness. There were statistically significant differences in the dimensions of extraversion and compassion, for the socio-professional variable Gender, with higher scores in men, in extraversion and in women, in compassion. It is concluded that nurses demonstrate high levels in the dimensions of empathy. Empathy as a multidimensional competence allows nurses to understand patients’ feelings, needs and perspectives. In the health field, it is essential for professional practice.
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