Introduction:

Empathy is important for the nursing professional and must be incorporated into the training of undergraduate students based on solid empirical evidence. The objective of this work was to characterize the empathic situation of the examined students.

Materials and methods:

It is an exploratory, cross-sectional work with 331 students from the School of Nursing of the Autonomous University of Coahuila, Mexico. The Jefferson Medical Empathy Scale (version S) was applied, adapted and validated for nursing students.

Cronbach's alpha and intraclass correlation were estimated to study the reliability of the data. A bifactorial analysis of variance was applied to determine differences between courses, genders and interaction between factors, regression models of the means of empathy across courses.

Results:

There is adequate reliability of the data. There are differences between courses for empathy and the compassionate care component, between genders in the components "compassionate care and ability to understand others". Low empathic growth that does not fit the decline model.

Conclusion:

The empathic behavior of students obeys non-linear models; The phenomenon of empathic decline does not manifest itself: the growth of empathy and its components is low; the growth of empathy in the "compassionate care" component is greater in men; in the component "taking the patient's perspective" it is higher in women and the ability to understand others is low and similar between genders.

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