Emotional contagion and emotional reactivity

When nursing staff are emotionally affected by a patient’s experience, emotional empathy is likely in play.  Eslinger et al. (2021) confirmed that perception of strong ‘other’ emotions – such as empathic concern for a patient – are clearly measurable within functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies as if the nurse themselves was experiencing the event.  Sharing in the patient’s experience, however, may paradoxically reduce the nurse’s accuracy in describing the patient’s underlying emotional state (Israelashvili et al., 2020a).

How is this possible?  Remember that there are two types of empathy.  Emotional empathy implies that nurses are ‘simulating’ (or recreating) another person’s emotions in their own mind.  For example, watching video clips of emotional facial expressions is known to activate similar emotions in the observer (Wicker et al., 2003).  Of note, people with higher levels of emotional empathy are likely to be very sensitive to changes in other people’s tone of voice and general sentiment (Esteve-Gibert et al., 2020).