Comparative study of medical and mental health students’ empathy and attitudes towards intellectual disability in Belgium

People with intellectual disabilities continue to face barriers to accessing equitable healthcare. Understanding how empathy and attitudes develop in medical and mental health students may help to inform the development of appropriate educational programmes. This study analysed the empathy (cognitive and affective) and attitudes (cognitive, affective, and behavioural) of medical and mental health students towards people with intellectual disabilities. Furthermore, we identified selected variables that contributed to students' attitudes towards this population. We conducted a cross-sectional study involving medical and mental health students from French-speaking universities in Belgium between March 2024 and March 2025. We examined both cognitive and affective dimensions of empathy via the Jefferson Scale of Empathy (JSE), Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) and attitudes via the Attitude towards Intellectual Disability Questionnaire (ATTID). This study included 347 students. Results showed that the majority of students reported little to no contact with individuals with intellectual disabilities. Across all disciplines, students demonstrated comparable empathy and attitudes. However, mental health students felt more personal distress. Regarding the influence of academic experience, master's students had greater empathy in healthcare than first-year bachelor's students. Furthermore, quality and frequency of contact, personal distress (i.e. self-oriented discomfort in response to others' distress), perspective-taking (i.e. the ability to adopt another's psychological point of view), empathic concern, and empathy in healthcare contributed to students' attitudes towards people with intellectual disabilities. This study makes a novel contribution to the understanding of empathy and attitudes among mental health and medical students towards people with intellectual disabilities. The identified associations between attitudes, empathy-related factors, and contact with people with intellectual disabilities suggest potential targets for educational interventions. Enhancing the quality of contact and supporting empathy-related competencies may be relevant considerations in the design of future training programmes. However, intervention studies are needed to determine whether such approaches effectively improve attitudes.