Primary-Care Physicians' Affective Orientation toward Their Patients

The relationship between personal characteristics of office-based primary-care physicians, characteristics of their routine practice of medicine, and two dimensions of affective orientation is examined. One dimension of affective orientation is a tendency to define a patient's behavior as hypochondria; the other is a tendency to define the patient's behavior as constituting a challenge to clinical competence and professional integrity. The results indicate that situational factors, particularly time spent conferring with colleagues, number of patients seen, and number of hours worked in an average week, affect the way in which personal and background characteristics, such as years in practice and country of medical education, relate to the physician's affective orientation toward patients.