Using Mindful Practices to Support Capacity for Empathy and Compassion Among Senior Undergraduate Health and Social Services Students: A Mixed Methods Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As part of their undergraduate education, students in health and social service disciplines learn about empathy and compassion to help prepare them for therapeutic encounters in clinical-professional settings. In this mixed methods study, we engaged senior undergraduate students (n=25) in mindful practices to further support their development of qualities associated with empathy and compassion for self and others. In Winter and Fall semesters of 2021, students participated in a three-part virtual workshop-series on mindful practices and were asked to engage in brief daily mindful activities, with optional bi-weekly check-ins with the research team. We evaluated the impact of mindful practices on wellbeing, self-compassion, mindfulness, and empathy using four established measures, and gathered qualitative data to explore participant experiences of mindful practices. Statistically significant improvements were found in self-compassion (p = 0.03) and curiosity (mindfulness) (p = 0.02) after participating in the intervention. Participants highlighted the value of mindful self-compassion in mitigating anxiety and stress, aggravated by the pandemic. Four key themes emerged: facing difficulty, developing present-moment awareness, increasing self-compassion, and growing empathy for others. Participants reported enjoying a sense of shared humanity with other participants, not being alone in facing difficulties, and the impact of this on developing empathy for others, which they recognized as a complex, yet needed quality. Thus, effects on empathy toward others were mixed. The experience of the pandemic affected both the implementation of the study and the participants themselves. Progressively decreasing levels of engagement, coupled with high degrees of stress and limited opportunities to attend clinical-professional practice settings, shaped participant experiences with mindful practices. Further research could build on this work by exploring the ways in which mindful practices could further strengthen future practitioners’ capacity for empathy toward others.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".