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Teaching Empathy: the Implementation of a Video Game into a Psychiatry Clerkship Curriculum

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Abstract

Objective

Empathy plays an important role for physicians, but the literature demonstrates that it often deteriorates during medical school. The purpose of this study is to investigate the use of the interactive video game “That Dragon, Cancer” as a tool to teach empathy to third-year medical students.

Methods

The authors gave a modified, Jefferson Scales of Physician Empathy (JSPE) to 84 third-year medical students in their psychiatry clerkship before and after they played and completed “That Dragon, Cancer” during the 2016–2017 academic calendar year.

Results

The average level of empathy in the students as measured by least squares means of the answers to the truncated JSPE improved after playing through “That Dragon, Cancer” (5.7738 vs 6.2322, p < 0.0001). The majority of students agreed that learning empathy through video games was preferable and more effective than traditional didactics.

Conclusions

Interactive video games such as “That Dragon, Cancer” may be useful as part of innovative curricula to improve empathy among third-year medical students.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Michael Gara, PhD, for his statistical analyses of the results.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson University Medical School, Piscataway, NJ, USA

    Andrew Chen, Adithya Manohar & Anthony Tobia

  2. Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA

    Jessie J. Hanna

Authors
  1. Andrew Chen
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  2. Jessie J. Hanna
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  3. Adithya Manohar
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  4. Anthony Tobia
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Andrew Chen.

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Disclosures

All data was anonymized. Participation was not compulsory. Demographic information was not compulsory. This was a quality improvement project to enhance the efficacy of our psychiatry clerkship didactics and as such did not require Institutional Review Board approval. On behalf of all the authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.

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Chen, A., Hanna, J.J., Manohar, A. et al. Teaching Empathy: the Implementation of a Video Game into a Psychiatry Clerkship Curriculum. Acad Psychiatry 42, 362–365 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40596-017-0862-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40596-017-0862-6

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