Clinical empathy refers to the ability of understanding patients’ experience, needs, and perspectives, checking how accurate one’s understanding is, and providing appropriate help accordingly. Clinical empathy had a huge impact on the work of medical staff. This paper reviewed the research of clinical empathy and medical staff's burnout, analyzed the relationship between them and further discussed the mechanisms of clinical empathy from two aspects: the generation of clinical empathy and its regulating process, which provided an explanation for the complex relationship between clinical empathy and burnout and the future research in this field was also prospected.