Empathy, personality traits, and emotional management in 2nd and 4th-year dentistry students: a single-center study
- Background: Patients fearing dental interventions are at risk of delaying or skipping much-needed treatments. Empathic communication could lead to a higher rate of compliance from patients within this group. Empathy, the big five personality traits, and emotion management abilities are all known to influence the quality of communication between dentists and patients. This study was conducted to analyze whether there is a correlation between these factors in dentistry students. Methods: Dentistry students in their 2nd and 4th year of study were asked to complete questionnaires assessing empathy, emotion management, and personality traits. Out of a total of 148 eligible participants, 53 students (34%) volunteered to participate. For empathy, the Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy (students’ version; JSPE-S) and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) were used. Personality traits were assessed using the Short Big Five Inventory (BFI-s), and the Situational Test of Emotional Management (STEM) to measure emotional management ability. Results: Higher scores for emotion management were significantly correlated with the female gender (p ≤ 0.005) and with higher scores in openness (p ≤ 0.05). Students with higher scores in openness also achieved higher scores on the IRI subscales: Perspective taking (p ≤ 0.05), Fantasy (p ≤ 0.01), Empathic concern (p ≤ 0.05), and Personal distress (p ≤ 0.05). For JSPE-S, no correlation with emotion management and personality traits was found. Conclusion: Empathy and emotion management might not be significantly related in dentistry students. Regarding personality traits, students who scored higher on openness also indicated higher abilities in emotion management. These findings should be taken into consideration when planning communication courses for dentistry students, as it might be possible to independently train empathy and emotion management as part of emotional intelligence.
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| Author: | Christian Lermen, Willi WetzelGND, Vanessa BritzGND, Jasmina SterzORCiDGND, Wolf Otto BechsteinORCiDGND, Teresa SchreckenbachORCiDGND |
|---|---|
| URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-695288 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-021-03080-1 |
| ISSN: | 1472-6920 |
| Parent Title (English): | BMC medical education |
| Publisher: | BioMed Central |
| Place of publication: | London |
| Document Type: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Date of Publication (online): | 2022/01/03 |
| Date of first Publication: | 2022/01/03 |
| Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
| Release Date: | 2023/07/06 |
| Tag: | Dental students; Emotional intelligence; Empathy; Personality inventory |
| Volume: | 22 |
| Issue: | art. 2 |
| Article Number: | 2 |
| Page Number: | 9 |
| First Page: | 1 |
| Last Page: | 9 |
| Note: | Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. |
| Note: | The datasets used and analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. |
| Note: | The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. |
| HeBIS-PPN: | 511286767 |
| Institutes: | Medizin |
| Dewey Decimal Classification: | 6 Technik, Medizin, angewandte Wissenschaften / 61 Medizin und Gesundheit / 610 Medizin und Gesundheit |
| Sammlungen: | Universitätspublikationen |
| Licence (German): |  Creative Commons - CC BY - Namensnennung 4.0 International |
