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. 2023 Jun 27;13(6):e073337.
doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2023-073337.

Impact of emotional competence on physicians' clinical reasoning: a scoping review protocol

Louise Joly  1 , Marjorie Bardiau  2 , Alexandra Nunes de Sousa  3 , Marie Bayot  3   4 , Valérie Dory  3 , Anne-Laure Lenoir  3
Affiliations

Impact of emotional competence on physicians' clinical reasoning: a scoping review protocol

Louise Joly et al. BMJ Open. .

Abstract

Introduction: Clinical reasoning (CR) is a key competence for physicians and a major source of damaging medical errors. Many strategies have been explored to improve CR quality, most of them based on knowledge enhancement, cognitive debiasing and the use of analytical reasoning. If increasing knowledge and fostering analytical reasoning have shown some positive results, the impact of debiasing is however mixed. Debiasing and promoting analytical reasoning have also been criticised for their lack of pragmatism. Alternative means of increasing CR quality are therefore still needed. Because emotions are known to influence the quality of reasoning in general, we hypothesised that emotional competence (EC) could improve physicians' CR. EC refers to the ability to identify, understand, express, regulate and use emotions. The influence of EC on CR remains unclear. This article presents a scoping review protocol, the aim of which will be to describe the current state of knowledge concerning the influence of EC on physicians' CR, the type of available literature and finally the different methods used to examine the link between EC and CR.

Method and analysis: The population of interest is physicians and medical students. EC will be explored according to the model of Mikolajczak et al, describing five major components of EC (identify, understand, express, regulate and use emotions). The concept of CR will include terms related to its processes and outcomes. Context will include real or simulated clinical situations. The search for primary sources and reviews will be conducted in MEDLINE (via Ovid), Scopus and PsycINFO. The grey literature will be searched in the references of included articles and in OpenGrey. Study selection and data extraction will be conducted using the Covidence software. Search and inclusion results will be reported using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses extension for scoping review model (PRISMA-ScR).

Ethics and dissemination: There are no ethical or safety concerns regarding this review.

Registration details: OSF Registration DOI: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/GM7YD.

Keywords: clinical decision-making; clinical reasoning; emotional intelligence; physicians.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interests: All authors have completed the Unified Competing Interest form (available on request from the corresponding author) and declare: no support from any organisation for the submitted work; no financial relationships with any organisations that might have an interest in the submitted work in the previous 3 years and no other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Emotional intelligence as described by Mikolajczak.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Three-level model of emotional intelligence, described by Mikolajczak.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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