Investigating the Impact of Emotions on Medical Students׳ Learning

Abstract

Purpose: Medical students’ negative emotions have the potential to hinder their learning, but there is no experimental evidence that this happens. This study investigated the effect of negative emotions on students’ learning processes and outcomes. Method: Eighty-five 5th-year students from a Brazilian medical school were randomly allocated to perform a priming task consisting of reading either (1) a diary describing a patient who died due to inappropriate care caused by unprofessional behaviours (emotional group); (2) a diary describing the same patient receiving appropriate care (neutral group) (3) an irrelevant extract of a local newspaper (control group). Subsequently, emotional reactions were measured, all students studied a medical text, and two tests were administered. Main outcome measures were time spent in studying the text and situational cognitive engagement with study (learning process), and mean scores in the two tests (learning outcomes). Results: The priming task triggered higher levels of emotions in the emotional group relative to both the neutral and the control groups though levels were low. The experimental conditions did not significantly differ in learning processes and outcomes. Discussion: Two tentative explanations for the lack of difference in the performance of three conditions are raised: (1) the level of emotions triggered by the vicarious experience was too low to affect learning, (2) the tests may have been not sensitive enough to capture eventual differences. Methodological choices that may be related to the two explanations are discussed. Keywords: Emotion, Learning, Medical education, Priming task, Research methods