Emotion recognition and clinical empathy: An observational study of nurses.

Aim: To explore nurse ability to recognize emotion and its association with clinical empathy.

Background: Empathy is elemental to nursing care and positively effects patient and nurse outcomes, yet self-reported clinical empathy has declined over the past decade. One hypothesized contributor to the ability of a nurse to be empathic is whether they can recognize emotion, a phenomenon thus far unstudied among nurses.