Accuracy of parents' perceptions of their college student children's health and health risk behaviors

The authors compared parents' perceptions of their college student children's health and health risk behaviors with the college students' own reports. One hundred sixty-four parent-college student child dyads completed questionnaires regarding the students' health, illness status, and health risk behaviors. Parents tended to be overoptimistic about their children's health and health risk behaviors, underestimating the frequency of their children's alcohol, smoking, marijuana, and sex-related behaviors, and overestimating the students' self-reports of general health. Such misperceptions may inhibit parent-student conversations about health and risky health behavior, ultimately putting the student at greater health risk.

Mothers' involvement in decision making during the birthing process: a quantitative analysis of women's online birth stories

This article reports on a study of 551 women's birth stories that were posted on a birth stories Web site. These online stories were analyzed for the communication and decision making that takes place between patients and clinicians during the birthing process. In more than half of the stories, the women wrote about at least 1 decision that was made. Further analyses were performed on the 285 stories in which decisions were made. According to this analysis, overall, women were involved in decision making about 57% of the time. The most frequent decision was about painkillers. Making decisions about painkillers and having a midwife as a primary clinician predicted a woman's increased involvement in decision making. Women's involvement in decision making correlated positively with the use of positive emotion words and negatively with the use of negative emotion words in the online birth stories.

Examining empathy in medical encounters: an observational study using the empathic communication coding system

Educators, researchers, clinicians, and patients often advocate empathy in the physician-patient relationship. However, little research has systematically examined how patients present opportunities for physicians to communicate empathically and how physicians respond to such opportunities. The Empathic Communication Coding System was used to investigate empathic opportunity-response sequences during initial visits in a general internal medicine clinic. This study focuses on 100 visits during which patients created at least 1 explicit empathic opportunity. Overall, patients presented 249 empathic opportunities in these 100 visits; physicians most often responded by acknowledging, pursuing, or confirming the patient's statement. The mean length of empathic opportunity-response sequences was 25.8 sec; sequences tended to be longer in duration when the physician used a more empathic response. Positively valenced empathic opportunities generated a more empathic response than did negatively valenced empathic opportunities. However, there was no relation between the emotional intensity of empathic opportunities and the level of empathy in subsequent physician responses. Further research should examine patient preferences and outcomes associated with varying levels of empathic responses.

Empathic communication and gender in the physician-patient encounter

Although empathy in the physician-patient relationship is often advocated, a theoretically based and empirically derived measure of a physician's empathic communication to a patient has been missing. This paper describes the development and initial validation of such a measure, the Empathic Communication Coding System (ECCS), which includes a method for identifying patient-created empathic opportunities. To determine the extent to which empathic communication varies with physician and patient gender, we used the ECCS to code 100 videotaped office visits between patients and general internists. While male and female patients created a comparable number of empathic opportunities, those created by females tended to exhibit more emotional intensity than those created by males. However, female patients were no more likely than male patients to name an emotion in their empathic opportunities. Physician communication behavior was consistent with the literature on gender differences: female physicians tended to communicate higher degrees of empathy in response to the empathic opportunities created by patients. The ECCS appears to be a viable and sensitive tool for better understanding empathy in medical encounters, and for detecting modest gender differences in patients' creation of empathic opportunities and in physicians' empathic communication.