Measuring the Emotional Intelligence of Medical School Matriculants

Objective: Emotional intelligence involves the ability to monitor one's own and others' emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use the information to guide thinking and actions.1 For physicians, these are crucial capabilities in clinical interactions with patients, their families, and other health care providers. We sought to gather information related to emotional intelligence from entering medical students by assessing their capacities to reflect upon and manage their emotions and be sensitive to the emotions of others. We are using this information to help monitor the development of our students' communication and interpersonal skills. Description: Two existing scales, the Trait Meta-Mood Scale (TMMS) and Davis' Interpersonal Reactivity Index (DIRI), were used to measure emotional intelligence. The TMMS assesses relatively stable individual differences in people's abilities to recognize, discriminate, and regulate their moods and emotions.1 The short form (30-item) of the TMMS taps three dimensions: attention to feelings (13 items, e.g., “I pay a lot of attention to how I feel”), mood repair (6 items, e.g., “Although I am sometimes sad, I have a mostly optimistic outlook”), and clarity of feelings (11 items, e.g., “I am usually very clear about my feelings”). The DIRI is a measure of empathy composed of four seven-item subscales, three of which were used here: perspective taking (e.g., “Before criticizing someone, I try to imagine how I would feel if I were in their place”), empathic concern (e.g., “I am often quite touched by things I see happen”), and personal distress (e.g., “I tend to lose control during emergencies”). Both instruments, comprising a total of 51 randomly ordered Likert-type items, were administered to the 2000 entering class at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine. Confidential responses were received from 91 of 101 students (response rate 90%). Using Cronbach's alpha, the internal consistency of each of the subscales was comparable to those previously published (TMMS: attention: α = .86, repair: α = .82, clarity: α = .88; DIRI: perspective taking: α = .69, empathic concern: α = .72, personal distress: α = .77). Intercorrelations within the TMMS were greatest between the attention and clarity dimensions (r = .53) and, among the DIRI subscales, between perspective taking and empathic concern (r = .52). All intercorrelations were somewhat larger than published results,1,2 suggesting more conceptual overlap among the subscales. The two scales themselves were moderately correlated (r = .44). Discussion: Overall, these two scales were useful in providing this information we needed to begin monitoring students' communication and interpersonal skills. This information lays a foundation for assessing individual differences in the abilities of students to identify their own feelings and those of others, regulating these feelings, and using the information provided by their feelings to adapt their behaviors. We hope to explore associations between medical school interviewers' ratings of emotional intelligence at admission and standardized patients' ratings of student performances in a medical interviewing class. We believe these instruments may enable us to identify core individual differences that characterize emotionally intelligent individuals capable of disclosing their feelings to themselves and other people, resulting in more effective physicians.1