Table 1 Key components of the Empathy-Enhancement Program for Medical Students.

1^st session

■ Survey before program

■ Mindfulness: how to monitor and recognize one’s condition

■ Emotion recognition: how to distinguish feelings from thoughts

■ Emotional expression using ‘I’ messages

2^nd session

■ Recognizing others’ emotions: how to decode nonverbal cues of emotion

■ How to listen to others’ emotions: facilitative listening

■ Cognitive chain of emotional response: situation, autonomic responses/thoughts, actions (thought, emotion, behaviour)

3^rd session

■ How to find cognitive biases and maladaptive emotional responses

■ How to correct cognitive biases and maladaptive emotional responses

4^th session

■ The meaning and purpose of empathic understanding

■ The difference between empathy and sympathy

■ The process of empathic communication

    1. Mindful attention to both verbal and nonverbal messages

    2. Empathic simulation of others’ emotion: using one’s own cognitive chain of emotional response

    3. Empathic reflection on others’ current emotion and possible causal factors (situation, thoughts, etc.) that might be related to that specific response

■ Possible obstacles to empathic communication

5^th session

■ How to perform empathic communication in the patient-doctor relationship

■ Empathy in the hospital: facilitator of humanistic connection to patient care

■ Review, wrap-up, and program evaluation