Medicine is not merely a job that requires technical expertise, but a profession concerned with making the best decisions and recommendations with reference to, and in consultation with, the patient. This means that the skill set required for healthcare professionals in order to provide good care is a combination of scientific knowledge, technical aptitude, and affective qualities or virtues such as compassion and empathy.

HIV stigma, a social-medical problem, continues to confound researchers and health professionals, while undermining outcomes. Empathy may reduce stigma; its absence may predict stigma. This research investigates: How does Kafka’s _Metamorphosis_ advance understandings of HIV stigma in medical health education? _Metamorphosis_ amplifies the sociological-relational mechanisms fostering HIV stigma. It offers a multi-disciplinary, responsive space for ethical, humanistic and clinical inquiry to meet: enabling students to consider how social structures shape health inequities, moral, social experience, and their professional identity within. _Metamorphosis_ (...) may ultimately promote medical health humanities’ social mission—allowing literature to unfold such revelations towards greater equity in health. (shrink)

_Purpose._ In the article, the author questions rethinking the phenomena of empathy and self-empathy as modes of self-understanding of humanity and the inner intention to self-exploration of human spirituality. _Theoretical basis._ The research is based on the phenomenological dimension of modern anthropology and axiology. _Originality._ The change of the traditional intersubjective approach in the understanding of empathy to an introsubjective one and the affirmation of self-empathy as one of the defining existences in human beings, which is adjusted by the altruism-egoism (...) value scale and forms the skills of unconditional empathic action towards the Other as a mode of self-exploration in the spiritual essence of a person are argued. _Conclusions._ The commonplace in a wide palette of research views on empathy is the construct for the Self – Other disposition and the intersubjective approach emphasizing the object of empathy. Transformation of the intention vector of empathic consciousness from the object to the subject of empathic action opens up deep possibilities of spiritual improvement as a way of self-awareness in the human essence. The transformation of the intention vector of empathic consciousness from intersubjective (I in the Other) to introsubjective (I through the Other) has the potential for spiritual development according to the altruism-egoism value scale. Empathy as an introsubjective position of self-exploration is inseparably connected with self-empathy, which in the mutual integration of its three main components – benevolence towards oneself, reflexivity towards one’s own experience and a tendency to understand one’s fate as common to all mankind – forms an important regulator of self-understanding of a person’s spiritual potential and the possibility of the practical extrapolation for these skills to an empathic way of communication at all levels of anthropo-being. Anthropological accentuation on the inner essence and meanings of human existence is carried out through intuition and self-altruism as the fading of pragmatic interest in the socially conditioned Self (Ego) and immersion in the essential Self – the bearer of the universal spiritual in a person. Self-empathy is considered in the context of the ideas of Stoicism as a deep self-immersion in the human essence and sensitivity to immediate emotional internal states, as a construct of emotional intelligence and a way of realizing individual uniqueness in the context of the metamodern concept of atopy. Self-empathy is defined as one of the key existences in human beings, which forms the skill of altruistic (unconditional) implementation of empathy. (shrink)

The present study aimed to delineate the characteristics of empathy and mental health in preschool teachers and examine the role of empathy in preschool teachers’ mental health. The sample in this study consisted of 4348 preschool teachers, who were divided into 4 groups according to their years of teaching experience (less than 2 years, 2 to 5 years, 5 to 10 years, and more than 10 years). The Chinese version of the Symptom Checklist 90 was used to measure the mental (...) health symptoms of the participants, and the Chinese version of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index was employed to assess various aspects of the participants’ empathy. The results indicated that preschool teachers scored higher than the controls for most mental symptoms, and most symptoms increased as teaching experience increased, independent of the effect of age. The study also found that the four dimensions of empathy showed different trends across the four teaching experience groups: fantasy remained stable, empathic concerns and perspective taking showed decreasing trends, and personal distress showed an increasing trend. Moreover, the present research found a relatively complex relationship between empathy and mental health in preschool teachers: while fantasy and personal distress positively predicted mental health symptoms in preschool teachers, perspective taking and empathic concern negatively correlated with most of the symptoms. It seems that empathy contains both risky and protective factors for individuals’ mental health, and these factors are affected by years of teaching experience. (shrink)