Association between dispositional empathy and self-other distinction in Irish and Belgian medical students: a cross-sectional analysis.

We show that self-assessment scores are associated with selected performance-based indices of perspective taking, providing a more fine-grained analysis of the cognitive domain of empathy assessed in medical student empathy scales. This analysis allows us to generate new critical hypotheses about the reasons why only certain self-report empathy measures (or their subscales) are associated with physicians' observed empathic ability.