Empathy Levels of Occupational Therapy Students

For occupational therapy educators to determine success at developing and/or maintaining among students empathy levels that are conducive to understanding and helping patients, educators must be able to measure changes in affective sensitivity. This paper briefly discusses methods of altering empathy levels and describes the use of Kagan’s Affective Sensitivity Scale to measure changes in empathy levels of occupational therapy students. Students were evaluated before and after completing a clinical practicum and a group process course and again one year later. The first Level I clinical practicum did not have the anticipated impact upon empathy scores, but the group process approach might have positively affected empathy levels. The significance of permanent changes in empathy scores might correlate with the intensity of the group process course. Kagan’s Affective Sensitivity Scale is useful for measuring changes in empathy levels.