Patient education and counseling
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Randomized Controlled Trial
The power of clinicians' affective communication: how reassurance about non-abandonment can reduce patients' physiological arousal and increase information recall in bad news consultations. An experimental study using analogue patients.
The diagnosis of incurable cancer may evoke physiological arousal in patients. Physiological arousal can negatively impact patients' recall of information provided in the medical consultation. We aim to investigate whether clinicians' affective communication during a bad news consultation will decrease patients' physiological arousal and will improve recall. ⋯ Although our findings need to be translated to clinical patients, they suggest that clinicians need to deal with patients' emotions before providing additional medical information.
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To investigate general practitioners' (GPs') and psychiatrists' responses to emotional disclosures in consultations with patients with depression. ⋯ Experiences from training in mentalization could be used to develop physicians' empathic or mentalizing approach. As most patients with depression are treated in primary care, developing GPs' mentalizing capacity instead of offering didactic training could have a substantial effect in the population.