Psychiatric services : a journal of the American Psychiatric Association
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The purpose of this article is to inform mental health professionals about the empirical literature on medical and psychiatric encounters and the influence of communicative behaviors on specific encounter outputs and treatment outcomes. ⋯ Twenty-five articles in medicine and 34 articles in psychiatry were selected. Medical communication researchers have observed associations between physicians' communicative skills and patients' satisfaction, patients' adherence to treatment recommendations, treatment outputs, and patients' willingness to file malpractice claims. The research has also shown that primary care physicians can be more responsive to patients' concerns without lengthening visits. In psychiatry, the literature can be organized into four discrete categories of research: negotiated treatment and the customer approach, therapeutic alliance, Gottschalk-Gleser content analysis of patients' speech, and content analysis of psychiatric interviews.