Meditation and Student Empathy

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.

Study Overview

• Status: Completed
• Conditions: Stress; Empathy
• Intervention / Treatment: Behavioral: Meditation

• Study Type: Interventional
• Enrollment (Actual): 78
• Phase: Not Applicable

Participation Criteria

Eligibility Criteria

• Ages Eligible for Study: 18 years and older (ADULT, OLDER_ADULT)
• Accepts Healthy Volunteers: Yes
• Genders Eligible for Study: All

Description

Inclusion Criteria:

-Medical students from New York Institute of Technology

Exclusion Criteria:

-Not a medical student

Study Plan

How is the study designed?

Design Details

• Primary Purpose: PREVENTION
• Allocation: RANDOMIZED
• Interventional Model: PARALLEL
• Masking: NONE

Number of Arms

2

Arms and Interventions

Participant Group / Arm	Intervention / Treatment
No Intervention: Control; No meditation
Experimental: Intervention; Meditate using headspace app 3 times a week	Behavioral: Meditation; Meditate 3 times a week using headspace app; Other Names: MIndfullness

What is the study measuring?

Primary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure	Measure Description	Time Frame
Perceived stress scale (PSS)	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.	6 months
Jefferson scale of empathy	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.	6 months

Collaborators and Investigators

• Sponsor: New York Institute of Technology

Study record dates

Study Major Dates

• Study Start (Actual): November 1, 2016
• Primary Completion (Actual): September 1, 2020
• Study Completion (Actual): September 7, 2021

Study Registration Dates

• First Submitted: October 31, 2017
• First Submitted That Met QC Criteria: October 31, 2017
• First Posted (Actual): November 6, 2017

Study Record Updates

• Last Update Posted (Actual): February 18, 2022
• Last Update Submitted That Met QC Criteria: February 16, 2022
• Last Verified: February 1, 2022

More Information

Terms related to this study

• Other Study ID Numbers: BHS-1245

Drug and device information, study documents

• Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated drug product: No
• Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated device product: No