Compassion and Spiritual Well-Being Shape Nursing Students’ Attitudes Toward People Living with HIV

Four decades after HIV was first identified, the virus remains one of the most heavily stigmatized diagnoses in modern medicine. Antiretroviral therapy has transformed HIV infection into a manageable chronic condition, yet people living with HIV/AIDS continue to report judgment, avoidance, and outright discrimination in the very places where they should expect care. Because nurses deliver the bulk of hands-on treatment, their attitudes can either soften or sharpen that stigma. A new study from Türkiye now suggests that two inner qualities of the caregiver—compassion and spiritual well-being—may be among the strongest psychological predictors of how positively future nurses will treat patients with HIV.

The research, published in the journal Current Psychology, was conducted by Dijle Ayar of Alanya Alaaddin Keykubat University together with Figen Alp Yılmaz and Fatma Özlem Üner. The team surveyed 350 undergraduate nursing students, using a battery of validated instruments to measure three things at once: the students’ spiritual well-being, their dispositional compassion, and their attitudes toward people living with HIV/AIDS. The participants, whose average age was about 21 and roughly 61 percent of whom were female, completed a personal information form along with the Three-Factor Spiritual Well-Being Scale, the short form of the Compassion Scale, and the Attitudes Toward People Living with HIV/AIDS Scale.

The statistical architecture of the study was straightforward but rigorous. The researchers first computed descriptive statistics to characterize the sample, then used Pearson correlation analysis to test whether the three psychological variables moved together, and finally applied multiple linear regression to determine which variables independently predicted attitudes toward people living with HIV. This last step matters because correlation alone cannot disentangle overlapping constructs; regression allows each predictor to be evaluated while statistically holding the others constant, revealing whether compassion and spiritual well-being each carry unique weight.

The correlational findings were striking. Spiritual well-being showed a moderate positive correlation with positive attitudes toward people living with HIV/AIDS, with a correlation coefficient of 0.426, highly significant at p less than 0.001. Compassion, however, was even more tightly linked: it correlated strongly and positively with favorable attitudes, at r = 0.647. In practical terms, students who described themselves as more compassionate were far more likely to endorse accepting, non-judgmental views of patients with HIV, while students with a richer sense of spiritual well-being fell in between.

The regression analysis confirmed that both traits stand on their own. Spiritual well-being emerged as a significant independent predictor of positive attitudes, with a standardized beta coefficient of 0.233, while compassion was the dominant force in the model, with a beta of 0.711. Both effects were significant at p less than 0.001. Taken together, the results indicate that nursing students with higher levels of spiritual well-being and compassion demonstrate markedly more positive attitudes toward people living with HIV/AIDS—and that compassion, in particular, is the psychological engine driving that openness.

Why would these two qualities matter so much for attitudes toward a stigmatized disease? The authors frame the answer in terms of person-centered care. Compassion, as conceptualized in the clinical literature, involves sensitivity to suffering paired with a motivation to relieve it; it is not mere sympathy but an active orientation toward the distressed other. A student high in compassion is psychologically prepared to see a patient with HIV first as a suffering human being rather than as a carrier of a feared virus. Spiritual well-being, measured here across three factors, reflects a sense of meaning, connection, and inner peace—resources that may buffer the fear and moral judgment that HIV has historically attracted, particularly in culturally conservative settings.

The Turkish context gives the findings particular weight. Türkiye sits at the intersection of Europe and the Middle East, and HIV-related stigma there is shaped by religious norms, limited public health education, and persistent misconceptions about transmission. Previous Turkish studies cited by the authors have documented negative or ambivalent attitudes toward HIV patients among university students and healthcare trainees, and qualitative work in Istanbul has recorded firsthand accounts of discrimination against people living with the virus. International comparisons, including a study of Turkish and American nursing undergraduates, have similarly highlighted how cultural context colors clinical attitudes. Against this backdrop, identifying modifiable psychological traits that predict acceptance offers a concrete lever for change.

The policy implications reach well beyond one country or one profession. Nurses are on the front line of HIV care worldwide, from antiretroviral adherence counseling to prevention outreach, and the Lancet Infectious Diseases has argued that lessons from the HIV pandemic position nurses as central actors in public health emergency preparedness. If stigma among providers discourages people from seeking testing or treatment, the public health consequences compound: delayed diagnosis, higher viral loads in communities, and widening inequities in care. The authors argue that educational strategies designed to strengthen compassion and spiritual well-being should be integrated directly into nursing curricula, so that stigma reduction is cultivated as a professional competency rather than left to chance.

Such integration could take several forms, consistent with the study’s framing. Reflective exercises that explore meaning and purpose in caregiving may nurture the spiritual dimension of well-being, while compassion-focused training—drawing on the growing psychological literature on compassion as a trainable skill rather than a fixed trait—could target the strongest predictor identified in the data. The authors also note that the findings extend to broader educational policy and healthcare training, supporting stigma-reduction initiatives not only in nursing programs but across the health professions. At the societal level, they suggest, promoting compassion and spiritual well-being among future healthcare professionals may help reduce HIV-related stigma, improve equity in healthcare, and raise the quality of care delivered to people living with HIV/AIDS.

The study’s design carries the usual caveats of cross-sectional survey research: it captures a single moment in time, cannot establish causation, and relies on self-reported measures within a single cohort of Turkish nursing students. Longitudinal work tracking students through clinical training, and replication in other cultural settings, would be needed to confirm whether cultivating compassion and spiritual well-being actually causes attitudes to shift. Still, the effect sizes reported—particularly the strong association between compassion and accepting attitudes—are large enough to demand attention from educators and policymakers alike. As the global HIV response increasingly recognizes that ending the epidemic depends on dismantling stigma, this study offers a deceptively simple insight: the way future nurses will treat people living with HIV may depend less on what they know about the virus than on who they are becoming as caregivers.

Subject of Research: The relationship between nursing students' spiritual well-being, compassion, and attitudes toward people living with HIV/AIDS in Türkiye

Article Title: The impact of future Nurses’ spiritual well-being and compassion levels on their attitudes toward individuals living with HIV/AIDS in Türkiye

Article References: Ayar, D., Yılmaz, F. A., & Üner, F. Ö. (2026). The impact of future Nurses’ spiritual well-being and compassion levels on their attitudes toward individuals living with HIV/AIDS in Türkiye. Current Psychology, 45(17), Article 1476. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10034-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10034-7

Keywords: HIV/AIDS, nursing students, compassion, spiritual well-being, stigma, attitudes, Türkiye, nursing education, person-centered care, health equity, Current Psychology, regression analysis