Do nurses and other professional helpers normally display much empathy?

Empathy, the ability to perceive and reason, as well as the ability to comm unicate understanding of the other person's feelings and their attached mea nings, is held to be a core characteristic of a helping relationship. This paper examines some of the observations that motivated the authors' interes t in how registered nurses learn how to offer empathy to clients. First, wh ile empathy is crucial to all helping relationships, professional helpers d o not normally offer much empathy. Second, while nurses are meant to provid e helping relationships, they do not tend to show much empathy to clients. The relevance of empathy to clinical nursing and the potential consequences of low-empathy nursing for clients is considered. It will be shown that, i n the past, a low level of empathy has been reported among the helping prof essions, including nursing, indicating that many professional helpers are n ot as helpful as they ought to be. While most studies of empathy in profess ional relationships are more than a decade old, more recent studies report similar results.