Impact of empathy interventions on cognitive, affective, and behavioral empathy in nursing students: a systematic literature review

Objective: To assess the method of empathy intervention in nursing students in relation to the three dimensions of empathy: cognitive, affective, and behavioral.
Methods: A systematic literature review was conducted following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta
Analysis (PRISMA) 2020 guideline. A search for articles in two databases (ScienceDirect and Taylor & Francis) revealed 99 articles.
One author independently assessed articles for inclusion, resulting in 10 articles that met the inclusion criteria.
Results: Based on a review of ten extracted journal articles, nine interventions showed increases in empathy, while one
intervention did not show such outcomes. Four studies (the simulation-based empathic communication training intervention,
the situated teaching program, high-fidelity simulation [HFS] training, and the structured empathy educational model [EEM])
discussed the impact of interventions on the empathy dimension, while the remaining five only explained the impact of the
intervention on empathy in general.
Conclusions: The result of this study highlight the need for future research to design empathy interventions for nursing students that effectively target both the affective and behavioral dimensions of empathy.