Feeling at hospitals: Perspective-taking, empathy and personal distress among professional nurses and nursing students

SummaryWhen facing a person in need, professional nurses will tend to adopt an objective perspective compared to nursing students who, instead, will tend to adopt an imagine-other perspective. Consequently, professional nurses will show lower vicarious emotional reaction such as empathy and distress. Using samples from Spain (Studies 1 and 2) and United states (Study 3), we compared perspective taking strategies and the emotional responses of nurses and nursing students when perceiving a sick child (Study 1) and a sick adult (Studies 2 and 3). Taken together, the results supported our hypotheses. We discuss the applied value of considering the relationship between perspective-taking and its emotional consequences for the nursing profession.