A Holistic Approach of Personality Traits in Medical Students: An Integrative Review.

Nicoleta Suciu,Lorena Elena Meliț,Cristina Oana Mărginean

doi:10.3390/ijerph182312822

Abstract

Personality is one of the most crucial aspects of human life, since it influences all human behaviours in both personal and social life, and might also trigger important conflicts with a person’s surroundings in the setting of incompatible traits and characteristics. It is true that ‘one must be born’ for a certain medical specialty, but several components of personality might be educated with proper training. Increased levels of Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Openness associated with lower levels of Neuroticism might represent the key combination for achieving professional satisfaction in the medical profession. Medical students should receive proper interprofessional education, since effective interprofessional relationships among healthcare providers definitely improve patients’ safety. Empathy contributes to effective patient–physician communication, improving patient trust, compliance, and satisfaction, being positively correlated with Openness, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Extraversion. Emotional intelligence—the capacity to respond to one’s own and others’ emotions—was proven to contribute, in a synergistic way with empathy, to increasing empathic ability. Clinical communication skills represent a key component in medical students in order to achieve the best patient care, and they are certainly related and/or influenced by empathy, interprofessional collaboration skills, emotional intelligence and, especially, personality traits. Taking into account the complex interactions mentioned above, the implementation of effective courses based on these concepts in medical students, intending to promote the development of clinical communication skills, represents a real emergency, since it might result in a reduction in medical errors and subsequent related deaths. A thorough understanding of students’ personality is mandatory before designing these courses in order to provide a training tailored to their personality styles.

Highlights

The ways people think, feel, and behave impact their daily social interactions and should be properly assessed and trained whenever possible, especially in terms of professions that require interhuman interactions
Personality traits were proven to be essential for medical students in choosing the most suitable specialty [6] based on a proper assessment and fair acknowledgement of their self-strengths and limitations
Professional satisfaction is definitely influenced by career choice, which should be properly guided after an individual assessment of personality traits

Summary

Introduction

The ways people think, feel, and behave impact their daily social interactions and should be properly assessed and trained whenever possible, especially in terms of professions that require interhuman interactions. Personality traits were proven to be essential for medical students in choosing the most suitable specialty [6] based on a proper assessment and fair acknowledgement of their self-strengths and limitations This takes into account that professional satisfaction influences the doctor’s quality of life and performance, and the patient’s outcome. Certain personality traits such as neuroticism and introversion might display a negative influence on interprofessional collaboration if not shaped properly during medical school in order to diminish traits that alter this collaboration as much as possible Based on these aforementioned facts, we might state that personality traits represent the core of medical performance, irrespective of their chosen specialty, and a thorough understanding and assessment of these traits are the missing puzzle piece for implementing proper medical training and improving patient outcomes. The main aim of this narrative overview was to underline the impact of personality traits on a physician’s work, academic satisfaction, and their patient’s outcome

Literature Search

Aim

Personality Traits in Medical Students—The Core of the Doctor–Patient

Findings

Conclusions