Association between relational attitudes and a training in communication and emotion handling skills

Background: The Emoty-Com training is a 16 hours-course based on interactive teaching to increase communication and emotion-handling skills for medical students. The study aimed to describe the Emoty-Com training impact on medical students’ attitudes towards patients’ emotions and to explore the association between students’ empathy, emotional intelligence (EI), attachment style (AS) and attitudes with post-training performance scores. Methods: The Emoty-Com training was delivered to all second-year students of Medicine and Surgery Schools in Verona and Milan (Italy) Universities. Empathy, AS and EI were assessed at pre-training; attitudes towards emotions in the doctor-patient encounter were assessed at pre-training and post-training; at post-training, a final test evaluating the knowledge acquired during the training was administered. Findings: The Emoty-Com training increased the relevance attributed to doctor emotional involvement, at least by male students, and students’ perception of self-efficacy in handling their own emotions during a consultation. Students with higher final test scores were those with less perceived self-efficacy in dealing with patients’ emotions before the training, while students with lower final scores were those who tended to give scarce importance to doctors' emotions in the clinical encounter after the training. Discussion: In contrast with previous literature, the relationship between AS, EI, empathy, and communication skills measured by the final test was not confirmed. Students' acquired knowledge resulted related to their attitude towards emotions, which should be considered in adapting future training to the specific needs of medical students.