Changing characteristics of the empathic communication network after empathy-enhancement program for medical students.

The Empathy-Enhancement Program for Medical Students (EEPMS) comprises five consecutive weekly sessions and aims to improve medical students' empathic ability, an essential component of humanistic medical professionalism. Using a graph theory approach for the Ising network (based on l-regularized logistic regression) comprising emotional regulation, empathic understanding of others' emotion, and emotional expressivity, this study aimed to identify the central components or hubs of empathic communication and the changed profile of integration among these hubs after the EEPMS. Forty medical students participated in the EEPMS and completed the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale-21, the Empathy Quotient-Short Form, the Jefferson Scale of Empathy, and the Emotional Expressiveness Scale at baseline and after the EEPMS.