Avinash Vikram Turankar1, Shankar Bhusari2, Manish Thakre3, Ashwita Uday Shetty4, Pramoda N.5, Sudhir Mahajan6
BACKGROUND
Emotional intelligence and temperament are important parts of medical practice
in good clinical history taking, diagnosis, effective treatment, and in managing the
extreme situations in the workplace. This is more important in young resident
doctors who lack the experience in handling patients. The primary objective of this
study is to evaluate the four different aspects of emotional intelligence and their
correlation with different temperamental factors in medical resident doctors.
METHODS
This is a cross sectional study. Students pursuing higher medical education were
assessed for temperament and emotional intelligence. Purposefully selected
participants were given temperament scale and emotional intelligence scale for
their assessment. The four components of emotional intelligence were correlated
with the 15 temperamental factors.
RESULTS
In this study medical residents were found to be low / very low on temperamental
scale on all 15 parameters and are average on emotional intelligence score on all
four parameters. There is a positive correlation between all temperamental factors
and emotional intelligence factors except secretiveness and aggressiveness, which
show negative correlation. When various subfactors of temperament were
correlated with grand emotional intelligence, sociability, vigorous, cooperative,
persistence and tolerance showed moderate strength of correlation ranging from
0.36 to 0.5. In comparison between male and female residents, factors like
acceptability, responsibility and persistence were predominant in males while
sociability, ascendant, placid, vigorous and tolerance were predominant in female
resident doctors.
CONCLUSIONS
In this study medical residents were found to be are low / very low on
temperamental scale and average on emotional intelligence. There is moderate
correlation between grand emotional intelligence and grand temperamental score.
There is no gender factor influence when head-to-head comparison was done but
individual gender wise correlation analysis has shown that emotional intelligence
correlates differently to temperamental factors in both genders.
