An effective training to increase accurate recognition of patient emotion cues

Abstract

Objective: For healthcare providers, accurate perception of patients, particularly accurate recognition of patient emotions, is an ability associated with better patient care and more satisfied patients. Despite the importance of accurately recognizing patient cues for provider-patient communication, research on clinically relevant training programs is limited. The effectiveness of a multi-component training program designed to enhance emotion cue recognition ability was experimentally assessed.

Methods: The comprehensive training included raising awareness about the importance of emotion cues in healthcare interactions, providing instruction on increasing emotion cue recognition accuracy, and practicing emotion recognition while receiving feedback. Undergraduate participants were randomly assigned to one of five training conditions or an untrained control condition to experimentally test the efficacy of the comprehensive training and each training component.

Results: Participants were significantly more accurate on a standardized test of patient emotion cue recognition in the comprehensive condition, as compared to those participants in the control condition, with Practice with Feedback emerging as the most effective component.

Conclusions: Results suggest that a 30-min emotion recognition training intervention can significantly improve emotion recognition accuracy.

Practice implications: The results can be used to guide development and implementation of future research and programs aimed at increasing providers' emotion recognition.