Bakgrund: Sjuksköterskor ställs dagligen inför etiska dilemman, komplexa situationer, lidande och sorg. Empati och medkänsla anses vara grundläggande inom omvårdnad, även om det idag råder en osäkerhet om begreppens innebörd. Lagar och förordningar pekar på empati och medkänsla som viktiga komponenter för en god vård. Vårdkvaliteten enligt patienter avgörs av upplevelsen av kommunikation, förståelse och medkänsla, vilket även visat sig avgörande för utfallet av den medicinska behandlingen. Syfte: Att beskriva sjuksköterskors upplevelser av empati och medkänsla i omvårdnadsarbetet. Metod: En litteraturstudie med beskrivande design. Artiklar söktes i MEDLINE via PubMed. Totalt inkluderades 14 kvalitativa artiklar i litteraturstudiens resultat. Huvudresultat: Genom tematisk analys resulterade litteraturstudien i att sjuksköterskors upplevelser av empati och medkänsla bestod av två huvudteman samt sex underteman. I det första huvudtemat beskrivs hur inre faktorer såsom personliga egenskaper och värderingar hos sjuksköterskor inverkar på deras empati och medkänsla. I det andra huvudtemat beskrivs hur yttre faktorer såsom organisation och kontext inverkar på sjuksköterskor empati och medkänsla. Slutsats: Oavsett om det råder en osäkerhet eller inte om empati och medkänsla som begrepp, så visar resultatet att empati och medkänsla som fenomen påverkas av inre och yttre faktorer enligt sjuksköterskor. Fenomenet upplevs påverka sjuksköterskors arbete, likväl upplever sjuksköterskor att de påverkas av de upplevelser och erfarenheter som omvårdnadsarbete medför. Tydligast visar resultatet att organisationen tillsammans med personliga värderingar har en avgörande betydelse för att öka medvetenheten och skapa förbättringsmöjligheter inom omvårdnadsarbetet. / Background: Nurses are daily faced with ethical dilemmas, complex situations, suffering and grief. Empathy and compassion are considered fundamental in nursing, even though today there is uncertainty about the meaning of the concepts. Laws and regulations point to empathy and compassion as important components for good care. The quality of care according to patients is determined by the experience of communication, understanding and compassion, which has also proved crucial for the outcome of the medical treatment. Aim: To describe nurses' experiences of empathy and compassion in the nursing practice. Method: A literature study with descriptive design. Articles were searched in MEDLINE via PubMed. A total of 14 qualitative articles were included in the results of the literature study. Main results: Through thematic analysis, the literature study resulted in nurses' experiences of empathy and compassion consisting of two main themes and six sub-themes. The first main theme describes how internal factors such as personal characteristics and values ​​of nurses affect their empathy and compassion. The second main theme describes how external factors such as organization and context affect nurses' empathy and compassion. Conclusion: Regardless of whether there is uncertainty or not about empathy and compassion as concepts, the results show that empathy and compassion as a phenomenon are affected by internal and external factors according to nurses. The phenomenon is perceived to affect the work of nurses, just as well as nurses are affected by the experiences that nursing work entails. The results most clearly show that organizations, together with personal values, has a crucial role to play in raising awareness and creating opportunities for improvement.

The therapeutic alliance has consistently been associated with improved client outcomes across numerous psychotherapy outcome studies. Previous systematic reviews have, however, evaluated the univariate association of the alliance with client outcome. The present meta-analytic review examines the association of the alliance with improved client outcomes after accounting for the presence of therapist empathy, client attachment styles, and client expectations. Across 23 independent studies, the alliance, adjusted for the presence of the other variables, remained as the most robust predictor of improved outcomes r = .258 (SE = .01, p < .001), with a 95% confidence interval of r = .18 to r = .33. After accounting for therapeutic alliance, therapist empathy was a small but statistically significant predictor of improved outcomes. These findings provide the first attempt at synthesizing multivariate estimates of the contribution of the alliance with improved outcomes when in the presence of empathy, client attachment style, and client expectations. The findings presented here suggest the superordinate nature of the alliance as a variable that exists on a separate conceptual level from the other variables evaluated.

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Images are used in history education for a variety of reasons, not least to generate interest through a better understanding of historical events and people. The aim of this study was to investigate how historical pictures, either illustrated or documentary/photographic, can be used as a resource for activating and improving pupils' historical empathy, in the way described by Stéphane Lévasque. I conducted a reception study on five different focus groups consisting of pupils from different upper secondary schools in Sweden. The pupils varied with regard to number of credits for admission to upper secondary school. A sixth group of pupils was interviewed as a contrasting control group in order to add perspective to the results. The discussions were based on the pupils' interpretations of 34 selected pictures, all of which were taken from the most common history textbooks. Each pupil was asked to choose the picture he/she felt was the most representative historical image. On the basis of the strategies used by the pupils when interpreting the pictures and discussing them, the material was analysed in accordance with Lévesque's categories: imagination, historical contextualisation and morals. The last category, morals, was further divided into three sub-categories: sense of justice, sympathy and progression. The reflections of the pupils and the degree of contextualisation varied. It appeared that the pupils were less inclined to discuss assumptions about the persons in the pictures; instead they chose to discuss the historical context in question. The pictures in this study did not seem to trigger the pupils to fabricate anachronistic reasoning about history; when they did produce lengthy reasoning, it was contextual, structural and metahistorical. In this context, the pupils who belonged to the group with the highest average of credits showed some signs of reflection on the basis of historical context and some criticism about the historical sources. On no occasion did any of the pupils choose a picture as a concrete expression of injustice. One of the questions this study aimed to explore was whether a lack of historical context affects how pictures trigger emotions and reasoning on the basis of moral aspects. Some of the pupils displayed moral standpoints, primarily the degree of morals concerning injustice. One possible interpretation could be that the feeling of being unfairly treated and subjected to insulting behaviour and social injustice was something the pupils could relate to. The group of pupils who had not yet studied history at upper secondary school, the control group, generally made reflections using this sort of reasoning when they discussed the historical aspects of the pictures.

Bakgrund: Empati är grunden i personcentrerad vård. I sjuksköterskans kärnkompetenser och kompetensbeskrivning går att läsa att sjuksköterskor skall bemöta patienter och anhöriga med respekt och empati. Där av behöver sjuksköterskans erfarenheter av empati, samt hur empati påverkar yrkesrollen, undersökas vidare. Syfte: Syftet med studien var att beskriva sjuksköterskors erfarenhet av empati och empatisk fatigue. Metod: En litteraturstudie med induktiv ansats valdes för att analysera 11 artiklar som ingick i resultatet. Resultat: Resultatet av studien mynnade ut i fyra huvudteman vilka var: förståelse för patienter grundar sig i att känna empati, förutsättningar som verkar möjliggörande eller hindrande för empati i omvårdnad, relation som nyckelfaktor för empatisk vård och vikten av emotionell återhämtning vid empatisk fatigue. Det framkom att sjuksköterskor hade svårt att definiera begreppet empati. Sjuksköterskornas erfarenheter visade också på faktorer som fungerar möjliggörande eller hindrande för empati. Den empatiska vården är beroende av att sjuksköterskan tillåts skapa en relation till patienter och anhöriga, men när balansen äventyras riskerar sjuksköterskan att drabbas av empatisk fatigue. Slutsats: Det skulle gagna vården att ytterligare omvårdnadsforskning bedrivs för att undersöka empatins roll i relation till sjuksköterskans yrke och den personcentrerade vården. Det behövs också ytterligare definiering av begreppet empati för att säkerställa bättre förståelse samt användning av empatisk vård. / Background: Empathy is the foundation of person-centred care. In the nurses' core competencies and competence description it can be read that nurses must treat patients and their relatives with respect and empathy. Therefore, the nurses’ experience of empathy, as well as how empathy affects the professional role, needs to be further researched. Aim: The aim of this study was to describe nurses' experiences of empathy and empathic fatigue. Method: A literature study with an inductive approach was chosen to analyse 11 articles, that were included in the results. Result: From the analysis four main themes revealed as follows: understanding patients is based on feeling empathy, conditions that seem to enable or hinder empathy in nursing, relationship as a key factor for empathic care and the importance of emotional recovery from empathic fatigue. The result revealed that nurses had a hard time defining the term empathy. The nurses' experiences also revealed enablers or barriers for empathy. The empathic care is dependent on the nurses being allowed to create a relationship with patients and relatives, but when the balance is compromised, the nurse can be affected by empathic fatigue. Conclusion: It would benefit healthcare that further nursing research is conducted to investigate the role of empathy in relation to the nurse’s profession and the person-centred care. There is also a need to further define of the concept of empathy to ensure better understanding and use of empathic care.

This thesis explores fictional representations of women’s reading practices in the early novels of Fredrika Bremer. I examine these in relation to the negotiations of reading habits in Sweden and Europe during the 1830’s, particularly pertaining to questions of gender, intimacy, desire, and corporeality. The material consists of three novels (The Family H***, The Neighbours and Home), in which the motif of women’s reading plays a significant part. In the four chapters of the thesis, I analyse key aspects of gender and reading in Bremer’s novels: 1) the popular stereotype of obsessive novel reading, and how this specific practice is portrayed in relation to the duties of a wife and mother, as well as to intimacy and secrecy; 2) representations of corrupted or illicit readers, whose reading practices disturbs the confines of nineteenth-century femininity; and 3) how these characters may challenge or bypass the restrictions of gender roles through fictional engagement. The thesis argues that Bremer’s representations of women’s reading are more complex and varied than has previously been recognized, and it reveals new aspects of these representations, such as the significance of intimacy with oneself and others in Bremer’s depictions of silent reading practices, and the transgressive power of feminine empathy. / <p>Camilla Wallin Bergström heter numera Camilla Wallin Lämsä</p>

abstract: ABSTRACT Domestic dogs have assisted humans for millennia. However, the extent to which these helpful behaviors are prosocially motivated remains unclear. To assess the propensity of pet dogs to spontaneously and actively rescue distressed humans, this study tested whether sixty pet dogs would release their seemingly trapped owners from a large box. To examine the causal mechanisms that shaped this behavior, the readiness of each dog to open the box was tested in three conditions: 1) the owner sat in the box and called for help (“Distress” test), 2) an experimenter placed high-value food rewards in the box (“Food” test), and 3) the owner sat in the box and calmly read aloud (“Reading” test). Dogs were as likely to release their distressed owner as to retrieve treats from inside the box, indicating that rescuing an owner may be a highly rewarding action for dogs. After accounting for ability, dogs released the owner more often when the owner called for help than when the owner read aloud calmly. In addition, opening latencies decreased with test number in the Distress test but not the Reading test. Thus, rescuing the owner could not be attributed solely to social facilitation, stimulus enhancement, or social contact-seeking behavior. Dogs displayed more stress behaviors in the Distress test than in the Reading test, and stress scores decreased with test number in the Reading test but not in the Distress test. This evidence of emotional contagion supports the hypothesis that rescuing the distressed owner was an empathetically-motivated prosocial behavior. Success in the Food task and previous (in-home) experience opening objects were both strong predictors of releasing the owner. Thus, prosocial behavior tests for dogs should control for physical ability and previous experience. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Psychology 2019