From Anticipatory Fear to Professional Appreciation: A Cross-Cultural Observation of Emotional Experiences in Medical Students During Initial Donor Dissection

Human donor dissection is a formative psychological experience in medical education that elicits diverse emotional, cognitive, and behavioral responses. The influence of cultural context on students’ emotional experiences, anxiety, and coping strategies remains insufficiently understood across geographically and culturally diverse settings. This study examined and compared these psychological responses among first-year medical students before and after their initial dissection experience. First-year medical students from four institutions: Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine (USA), the American University of Beirut (Lebanon), Queen’s University Belfast (Northern Ireland), and Addis Ababa University (Ethiopia) completed surveys one week before (T1) and one week after (T2) their first dissection. Data were analyzed using one-way analysis of variance with Bonferroni correction. Emotional experiences differed significantly among institutions at T1 but converged at T2, suggesting that the dissection experience itself brought students from different cultural backgrounds to a similar emotional level. Cultural attachment remained stable across time points. Anxiety decreased at T2 across all institutions. Positive coping showed no significant differences at T1 but differed significantly at T2, while negative coping differed significantly at both time points. These findings indicate that donor dissection produces largely adaptive psychological responses across culturally diverse medical student populations, reinforcing its value as a pivotal shared experience in professional identity formation. The stability of cultural attachment suggests that it shapes how students interpret and emotionally process dissection rather than being altered by it. These results support the development of anatomy curricula that are evidence-based and responsive to the cultural background of their students.