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Association between HEXACO personality traits and medical specialty preferences in Mexican medical students: a cross-sectional survey.

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND:Medical specialty is a critical choice in a physician's life because it determines their professional future and medical practice. While some are motivated to choose a specific specialty based on the monetary gain it can provide, others are inspired by seeing the work performed by a physician or by a patient's recovery. It is common to stereotype doctors' personalities by their specialty. METHODS:This was a cross-sectional survey study in which we administered the 100-item HEXACO Personality Inventory-Revised to 292 medical students between September 2018 and March 2019. We evaluated six different domains of personality traits. We also included questions about their medical specialty of choice, their least preferred specialty, and the motivation behind these choices. The participants included 175 women (59.9%) and 117 men (40.1%). RESULTS:When the participants were asked about their preferred type of medical specialty, 52.4% indicated a preference for surgical specialties (surgical group) vs 47.6% who preferred clinical specialties (clinical group). We found that the surgical group showed significantly higher scores for Extraversion and Organization domains, while the clinical group showed significantly higher scores on the Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, and Agreeableness domains. We identified critical differences within the overall group of medical students by their medical specialty preference. CONCLUSIONS:Some classical stereotypes were confirmed by our results, such as surgical specialists tending to be more extroverted and organized, whereas clinical specialists were prone to being more introverted, anxious, and more emotionally attached to their patients.

SUBMITTER: Barbosa-Camacho FJ

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7071694 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Association between HEXACO personality traits and medical specialty preferences in Mexican medical students: a cross-sectional survey.

Barbosa-Camacho Francisco José FJ Miranda-Ackerman Roberto Carlos RC Vázquez-Reyna Itzel I Jimenez-Ley Vania Brickelia VB Barrera-López Francisco Javier FJ Contreras-Cordero Vianca Seleste VS Sánchez-López Veronica Alexandra VA Castillo-Valverde Tom Jilmer TJ Lamas-Abbadie Claudina Del Carmen CDC González-Adán Brenda Alicia BA Cortes-Flores Ana Olivia AO Morgan-Villela Gilberto G Cervantes-Cardona Guillermo Alonso GA Cervantes-Guevara Gabino G Fuentes-Orozco Clotilde C González-Ojeda Alejandro A

BMC psychology 20200314 1

<h4>Background</h4>Medical specialty is a critical choice in a physician's life because it determines their professional future and medical practice. While some are motivated to choose a specific specialty based on the monetary gain it can provide, others are inspired by seeing the work performed by a physician or by a patient's recovery. It is common to stereotype doctors' personalities by their specialty.<h4>Methods</h4>This was a cross-sectional survey study in which we administered the 100-i ...[more]

PMID: 32171327

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Project description:BACKGROUND:Empathy promotes positive physician-patient communication and is associated with improved patient satisfaction, treatment adherence and clinical outcomes. It has been suggested that personality traits should be taken into consideration in programs designed to enhance empathy in medical education due to the association found between personality and empathy among medical students. However, the associations between empathy and big five personality traits in medical education are still underrepresented in the existing literature and relevant studies have not been conducted among medical students in China, where tensions in the physician-patient relationship have been reported as outstanding problems in the context of China's current medical reform. Thus, the main objective of this study was to examine the associations between empathy and big five personality traits among Chinese medical students. METHODS:A cross-sectional study was conducted in a medical university in Northeast China in June 2016. Self-reported questionnaires including the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) and Big Five Inventory (BFI) and demographic characteristics were distributed. A total of 530 clinical medical students became our final subjects. Hierarchical regression analysis was performed to explore the effects of big five personality traits on empathy. RESULTS:Results of this study showed that big five personality traits accounted for 19.4%, 18.1%, 30.2% of the variance in three dimensions of empathy, namely, perspective taking, empathic concern and personal distress, respectively. Specifically, agreeableness had a strong positive association with empathic concern (? = 0.477, P<0.01), and a moderate association with perspective taking (? = 0.349, P<0.01). Neuroticism was strongly associated with personal distress (? = 0.526, P<0.01) and modestly associated with perspective taking (? = 0.149, P<0.01). Openness to experience had modest associations with perspective taking (? = 0.150, P<0.01) and personal distress (? = -0.160, P<0.01). Conscientiousness had a modest association with perspective taking (? = 0.173, P<0.01). CONCLUSION:This study revealed that big five personality traits were important predictors of self-reported measures of both cognitive and affective empathy among Chinese medical students. Therefore, individualized intervention strategies based on personality traits could be integrated into programs to enhance empathy in medical education.

Dataset Information

Association between HEXACO personality traits and medical specialty preferences in Mexican medical students: a cross-sectional survey.

Publications

Association between HEXACO personality traits and medical specialty preferences in Mexican medical students: a cross-sectional survey.

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