Volume 28, Issue 2
DOI: 10.24205/03276716.2019.1095
Empathy in the performance and training of clinical and health psychologists, and its relation with mindfulness and compassion
Abstract
In this article the importance of empathy in the psychotherapeutic field is analyzed, and also the need of promoting its development in clinical and health psychologist. It is exposed the main contributions about the study of empathy, introducing the concept of biases in the inference, a set of errors that could negatively influence empathy. Moreover, the relation between mindfulness, empathy, and compassion is suggested –understanding the last one as the vertebral axis of the psychological interventions-, and then focusing on the advantages of including mindfulness and compassion-based interventions (MCBI) in the academic training of clinical and health psychologists, especially in regard to improving empathy.
Keywords
Empathy, Mindfulness, Compassion, Psychotherapy, Clinical and health psychology