Empathy in Social Work Education:
Are there differences between MSW students from online and
traditional graduate programs?
Juan Carlos Araque, PhD and Bianca Harper, DSW, LCSW
USC School of Social Work
Additional faculty contributing to this research: Kristen Zaleski, PhD; Kim Finney, PhD; Jennifer
Lewis, PhD; & Michal Sela-Amit, PhD
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How do we define empathy?
To share the experiences of another (Greenson,
1960).
“the act of perceiving, understanding,
experiencing and responding to the emotional
state and ideas of another person” (Barker, 2008,
p. 141).
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Empathy: Literature Review
 Kohut - Empathic Mirroring is essential in early childhood to avoid
pathological narcissism
 Attachment theory - Empathy is a product of secure attachment to
a caregiver.
 Neurobiology - Empathy is a function of the pre-frontal cortex
(Cozolino, 2010)
 Cognitive understanding, emotional attunement, and affect
regulation - necessary ingredients for empathic ability (Cozolino,
2010; Dyche & Zayas, 2001; Berzoff, Flanaggan & Hertz, 2011).
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Gender and Empathy
 Women are more empathic than men in
 Medicine (Chen et al., 2012; Hasan et al., 2013; Quince, Parker, Wood, & Benson, 2011; Shariat, &
Habibi, 2013)
 Pharmacy (Fjortoft, Van Winkle, & Hojat, 2011)
 Nursing (Fields et al., 2011; Hsiao, Tsai, & Kao, 2013; Ouzouni, & Nakakis, 2012),
 Dentistry, Veterinary Science (Nunes et al., 2011)
 Law (Wilson, Prescott, & Becket, 2012)
 Men have been found to be more empathic in paramedic settings (Williams et
al., 2012; Williams et al., 2013; Austin et al., 2007)
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Race/Ethnicity and Empathy
 Latino students had higher levels of social empathy attitudes when
compared to other ethnicities in a college sample (Segal, 2011).
 Meta-analysis revealed Asian medical students had the biggest pre
& post difference in empathy scores (Batt-Rawden, Chisolm, Anton,
Flickinger, 2013).
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Social Work & Empathy
 From Segal (2011),
“Actual research on empathy, as well as evidence of empathy
training in the social work curriculum, remains scarce and sketchy.
NASWs Encyclopedia of Social Work (Mizrahi & Davis, 2008) contains
no entry for ‘empathy’- a glaring omission that illustrates the
generally narrow and haphazard consideration of empathy in the
social work literature (Freedberg, 2007; Raines, 1990)”.
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Our Research Study - Methods
 Mixed methods, quantitative and qualitative approaches
 Cross sectional, pre-experimental design.
 Recruited 306 MSW students - sent email to all enrolled University of Southern California
(USC) MSW graduate students.
 Differences in gender, ethnicity, program year, method of study, and concentration
designation were examined.
 IRB approved
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Our Hypotheses
 Females would be more empathic than males
 Hispanic students would be more empathic than non-Hispanic
students
 First year students would have more empathy than second year
students
 Students in different concentrations would have different levels of
empathy
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Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective
Empathy (QCAE)
 Ten percent of the MSW student body (N=306) completed the QCAE
 The QCAE is 31-item parametric scale rated on a 4-point Likert scale with the
response options: "strongly agree," "slightly agree," "slightly disagree," and "strongly
disagree."
 This instrument has five subscales: perspective taking and online simulation within
cognitive empathy; and emotion contagion, peripheral responsivity, and
proximal responsivity within affective empathy.
 Descriptive and inferential statistics in Qualtrics and SPSS software were used to
determine variance among variables.
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Quantitative Results
 Race/Ethnicity: Not statistically significant.
 Year of school: Not statistically significant.
 Gender: Statistically significant in affective empathy, but not in cognitive
empathy.
 Classroom learning vs. online learning: statistically significant in one area of
affective empathy: emotion contagion. Not statistically significant in any other
four subscales.
 Suggests the synchronization of personal emotion among students seems to occur more
frequently on-the-ground (traditional) than the online program.
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Qualitative Interviews
 N = 34 students who were randomly selected from the sample of
survey respondents.
 27 females and 7 males.
 Caucasian (16), Hispanic (8), African American (4), and Asian
American (4)).
 14 interviewees were first year MSW students and 18 were second
year MSW students.
 15 were traditional classroom students and 17 were students whose
program is online.
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Interview Themes
 Through coding and analysis the following three themes emerged
from the student interviews:
1) self experiences of empathy
2) empathic challenges
3) empathy as an ongoing learning process.
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Self Experiences of empathy
 Relatability:
 …I was able to relate to a lot of what my clients were going through,
having clients come into the school that I was at and sharing their
experiences, having been in similar situations in the past definitely
made it more relatable to what they were going through
 …I would say some of the veterans. I think are, at least some of them
are in line with some of the same struggles I have. Where it is easier to
be empathetic to the veteran population, versus other populations.
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Self experiences of empathy
 Empathic Deprivation (lack of empathy in childhood)
 Because there’s times where I didn’t really get that…It would have been helpful and
made a lot of things easier, so I think to see that need, that’s what motivates me to be
empathetic towards other people. Because I didn’t really get that enough until I was
older.
 …I think in my life I have gone through a lot of things, and the support that I have
gotten has been awesome, and I feel that if I would have had that at a younger age, I
think I would have maybe gone further in life. So for me that’s my reason behind it, I
want to help those little kids that didn’t get the help, if that makes sense, and give
them the support, and emotional support that they would need.
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Empathic Challenges
 Lack of Understanding
 When I’m talking to somebody and I really just don’t know, like I haven’t been
through the same thing, like same experience as them. So it’s kind of really
hard for me to wrap my head around how they’re feeling or what that
experience is like.
 So now I am working with a client from a military background and I am not a
military background so she just said how she has been feeling sad and…so I
guess I couldn’t provide empathy because I couldn’t really put myself in her
shoes and so I responded with like, oh that must be hard for you but that was
being sympathetic not really empathetic at that moment, like I felt bad for her
but couldn’t really relate.
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Empathic Challenges
 Lack of role models
 “I really had to learn empathy. It didn’t come naturally for me, growing up in
an abusive home. It took me a really long time to really get to a place where I
could frame things and understand things from someone else’s point of view,
so it was a difficult struggle”.
 “I think I use to me a more empathetic person. In fact, I know I used to be a
more empathetic person in my childhood. I think that my military experience
has colored my empathy quite a bit, especially my combat experience.
Empathy is a liability in the warzone because you cannot be emotionally
connecting with the situations that you find yourself in. Otherwise you’ll go
crazy. Since coming home from that, I have found it extremely extremely
difficult to connect with human suffering on the level of day-to-day systemic
interactions”.
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Empathy as an ongoing learning process
 Empathic Modeling
I see my mom’s ability to connect with her patients and just be
there for them and you know I feel like I learned how to do that
from her.
… I think what brought that student-professor relationship closer
was when I was having personal issues, in my personal life, he
noted that I was not myself in class. So he took me out of class
and said, “I noticed you are acting a lot differently than you
normally do and I just want to see if everything is okay”. And that
went a long way. That was a good example of being that
attuned to someone.
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Empathy as an ongoing learning process
 Cognitive learning affects empathy
“…It’s been a lot of the things that we have had to study about
generational cycles of, as far as marginalization, and umm,
poverty, and you know, just the welfare cycle, and how umm,
how drug abuse and violence and dysfunction at home affects
a person…their brain, their makeup, just the way that they
present in society and what they think is the real world in their
eyes. I think we all grow up thinking everybody knows this sort of
black and white, right and wrong, and I’ve really learned
through school and internship that that’s not necessarily so”.
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Clinical Implications
 Empathic mirroring is important per respondents self reports.
 Empathy can change in adulthood
 Empathy can develop despite adverse childhood circumstances
 Emotionally connecting to a client’s past appears to be helpful in
creating empathy for others
 Mindfulness has promising results in enhancing empathy
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Pedagogical Implications
 Educators need to create empathic connectedness in an online
training format where students can feel emotion contagion
(Mutual eye gaze per neurobiology is an important aspect of
empathic connectedness… can this be achieved online?)
 Educators need to address the disengaged (traumatized) students
and help them to re-connect to others
 Examine if we are teaching unknowingly to female students more
often than male students?
 Professor impact on empathy in a student
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Questions
Juan Carlos Araque, PhD
Bianca Harper, DSW, LCSW
araque@usc.edu
bmharper@usc.edu
Clinical Associate Professor
Clinical Assistant Professor
University of Southern California
University of Southern California
School of Social Work
School of Social Work
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