Development and initial psychometric testing of a new instrument for assessing empathetic clinical gaze among medical students

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Source: Frontiers Medicine

Original: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2025.1697526...

Published: 2026-01-15T00:00:00Z

The traditional medical view promotes a detached form of clinical empathy that prevents effective communication with patients and neglects their emotional experience. Empathy includes both cognitive and emotional components, but tools that assess it as a single attribute are lacking. The authors proposed the concept of empathic medical gaze (EMG) and developed a related scale to measure medical students' concern for patients through emotional attunement. The study tested a 20-item instrument on 251 medical students in Sweden. Analyzes resulted in a 16-item scale with high reliability (α = .87), item-total score correlations ranging from .37 to .60, and a one-factor solution. The scale supports the use of a total score to assess this attribute. Future research should test the stability, validity, and advanced methods such as Rasch measurement theory.