Feeling your joy helps me to bear feeling your pain: Examining associations between empathy for others' positive versus negative emotions and burnout

Working with others experiencing negative emotions is an emotionally draining experience that can lead to a variety of negative outcomes. Foremost among these is burnout, a serious problem among those who work in helping professions. Burnout negatively impacts the work quality, job commitment, and health of those who suffer from it, and can result in poorer outcomes for those with whom they work. Given these many deleterious effects of burnout, it is critical to understand the factors that contribute to burnout as well as those that can protect against it and help create more satisfying professional lives for caregivers. Drawing on recent scholarship highlighting the distinction between empathy for others' negative vs. positive emotions, the present work proposes that whereas strong and repeated connection with others' negative emotions can place individuals at greater risk for burnout, connecting with others' positive emotions may help protect against burnout and increase job satisfaction. These issues were examined in two different high-stress professions, front line mental health providers and teachers. Consistent with predictions, results showed that whereas individuals' dispositional levels of negative empathy were associated with greater burnout and lowered job satisfaction, dispositional positive empathy was associated with decreased burnout and greater satisfaction.