Emotional Intelligence and Clinical Empathy among Medical Students: The Conditional Effects of Spirituality and Gender

Abstract

Clinical empathy (CE) is a crucial component that influences how well patients respond to treatment. This necessitated the examination of the factors that promote CE among undergraduate medical students. Therefore, this study investigated the individual and combined conditional effects of spirituality (SS) and gender on the emotional intelligence (EI) – CE relationship. Participants were 202 undergraduate medical students who have had direct contact with patients. The sample comprises 86 males and 116 females with an average age of 22.52 years. Instruments with proven psychometric qualities were used to collect data on each variable. A regression-based analysis complemented by model 2 of Hayes’ PROCESS macro via the IBM-SPSS v25 was utilised for testing the hypotheses and developed model. The direct effect results indicated that EI and SS positively and significantly predicted CE. The moderating effect of SS on the EI-CE relationship was significant while that of gender was not. The combined moderating effects of SS and gender on the EI-CE link were significant and stronger for females with higher levels of SS. These findings led to the conclusion that EI, SS and gender are valuable mechanisms to consider when making policies to improve CE.