Burnout undermines empathising: do induced burnout symptoms impair cognitive and affective empathy?

ABSTRACT

Empathy is crucial for the quality of social interactions and thus highly relevant in human service professions. At the same time, people belonging to this occupational group are especially vulnerable to developing burnout symptoms. With this study, we aimed to investigate the causal link between burnout symptoms and empathy by using a novel experimental design. Our participants (N = 355; 44.5% women; M_age = 36.37) filled out an online questionnaire; in an autobiographical memory task, the experimental group retrieved previous burnout experiences, whereas one control group retrieved a neutral memory and another control group received no intervention. After measuring current burnout symptoms as a manipulation check, we measured the cognitive and affective empathy of all participants. Findings indicate that the experimental group reported significantly higher burnout symptoms compared to control groups, validating our intervention method. Furthermore, we found that the experimental group scored lower on one of the cognitive empathy measures, suggesting negative effects on the relational skills of burned-out individuals. Results are discussed with regard to ecological validity and implications.

KEYWORDS:

• Empathy
• emotion recognition
• emotional understanding
• burnout
• autobiographical memory task

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We chose a small effect size and a conservative power level due to the artificial nature and novelty of the experimental design.

2 Participants were excluded if they did not respond to the question presented during the intervention, but wrote about something else (n = 7), or if they wrote essays with a particularly positive connotation in the experimental group (n = 4) or with a clear negative connotation in the control group 1 (n = 2). Further, we excluded one participant who provided two completely different essays in the manipulation task and in the refreshment task (completed between the two cognitive empathy tests), suggesting two different persons filling out the same questionnaire.

3 Copyright ©1981 Christina Maslach & Susan E. Jackson. All rights reserved in all media. Published by Mind Garden, Inc., www.mindgarden.com

4 One item of the STEU had to be deleted due to incorrect orthography and, therefore, possible misunderstanding.

5 Congruently to the STEU, one item had to be deleted due to incorrect orthography and, therefore, possible misunderstanding. Another item contained two incongruent names; however, we did not remove the item because the content was not affected and descriptive values did not differ from the other items.

6 In our preregistration, we stated we would conduct multivariate analysis of variance with all three empathy measures as dependent variables. However, because affective empathy scores did not correlate with the two cognitive empathy measures, we conducted independent t-tests instead.