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Does medical training affect personality?
Author(s) -
HUXHAM G. J.,
LIPTON A.,
HAMILTON D.
Publication year - 1985
Publication title -
medical education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.776
H-Index - 138
eISSN - 1365-2923
pISSN - 0308-0110
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2923.1985.tb01151.x
Subject(s) - affect (linguistics) , personality , psychology , training (meteorology) , medical education , clinical psychology , applied psychology , medicine , social psychology , communication , geography , meteorology
Summary. We have compared results obtained for psychometric tests (Cattell's 16 PF and Eysenck's personality inventory) on a cohort of medical students who sat the tests in their second medical school year and repeated them in their sixth and final year. Most of the changes were in the direction expected of students maturing through the 19–24 year age period, but there were some significant differences from those obtained by other workers using the same tests on general student populations. Thus, in our study male students became ‘brighter’, more ‘emotionally stable’, less ‘timid’, more ‘tough‐minded’, and more ‘self‐controlled’, all of these to a significantly greater extent than expected with the general student population. Similar changes were observed from females, although except for an increase in emotional stability, these were not significantly different from the values expected in the general population.