Measuring Emotional Intelligence of Medical ... - Semantic Scholar

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Measuring Emotional Intelligence of Medical School Applicants Robert M. Carrothers, MA, Stanford W. Gregory, Jr., PhD, and Timothy J. Gallagher, PhD ABSTRACT Purpose. To discuss the development, pilot testing, and analysis of a 34-item semantic differential instrument for measuring medical school applicants’ emotional intelligence (the EI instrument). Method. The authors analyzed data from the admission interviews of 147 1997 applicants to a six-year BS/MD program that is composed of three consortium universities. They compared the applicants’ scores on traditional admission criteria (e.g., GPA and traditional interview assessments) with their scores on the EI instrument (which comprised five dimensions of emotional intelligence), breaking the data out by consortium university (each of which has its own educational ethos) and gender. They assessed the EI instrument’s reliability and validity for assessing noncognitive personal and interpersonal

Though American medical education has changed much since 1910, when Flexner wrote his landmark report,1 it continues to emphasize physicians’ biomedical knowledge while downplaying their ability to relate to patients.2 Recently, however, many in the community, increasingly aware of the need for more primary care physicians and physicians with better interpersonal skills, have questioned medical educa-

Mr. Carrothers is a PhD candidate, Dr. Gregory is professor, Dr. Gallagher is assistant professor, all in the Department of Sociology, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio. Correspondence and requests for reprints should be addressed to Dr. Gregory, Department of Sociology, Kent State University, PO Box 5190, Kent, OH 44242-0001; e-mail: 具[email protected]典. For a Commentary on this article, see page 446.

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qualities of medical school applicants. Results. The five dimensions of emotional intelligence (maturity, compassion, morality, sociability, and calm disposition) indicated fair to excellent internal consistency: reliability coefficients were .66 to .95. Emotional intelligence as measured by the instrument was related to both being female and matriculating at the consortium university that has an educational ethos that values the social sciences and humanities. Conclusion. Based on this pilot study, the 34-item EI instrument demonstrates the ability to measure attributes that indicate desirable personal and interpersonal skills in medical school applicants. Acad. Med. 2000;75:456–463.

tion’s heavy reliance on the biomedical model.3 They suggested that medical school curricula be modified to place more emphasis on the interpersonal dimension of medical practice and that medical schools admit applicants who show desirable interpersonal skills4 — what social psychologists have referred to as ‘‘emotional intelligence.’’ These skills include such qualities as empathy, compassion, and maturity. This article reports on a pilot project in which we collaborated with members of the admission department of Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine (NEOUCOM) to develop, use, and evaluate an instrument for measuring the emotional intelligence of medical school applicants. NEOUCOM is a consortium of three universities (Kent State University, the University

of Akron, and Youngstown State University); we compared data from students applying to the NEOUCOM program in 1997. Medical School Admission and Emotional Intelligence In 1995, the president and dean of NEOUCOM charged the three consortium universities to improve their interview procedures, with specific attention to admitting medical students with superior personal and interpersonal qualities and abilities. In compliance with that charge, NEOUCOM and its consortium schools organized an admission task force that consisted of physicians, administrators, and academics (including two of the authors: SWG and RMC). The goal of the task force was

ACADEMIC MEDICINE, VOL. 75, NO. 5 / MAY 2000

to suggest changes in the admission procedures consistent with the dean’s directive and to provide admission administrators with specific means for accomplishing the directive’s goals. To assist the task force, we first contacted all six-year medical schools in the United States to determine their admission procedures with respect to the interview. The medical schools that responded to our request for information, though expressing an interest in more accurately assessing applicants’ noncognitive skills, did not report having any means for doing so. Second, we polled members of the NEOUCOM admission committee, which consists of 220 academics and physicians who interview applicants. They indicated that interviews would result in a better student body if they increased the emphasis on criteria measuring the personal and interpersonal abilities of prospective students. We found that survey results corresponded closely with the social psychological literature on emotional intelligence. The concept of emotional intelligence was introduced in the early 1990s by Salovey and Mayer,5 who defined it as ‘‘a type of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.’’6 These ideas were later expanded upon by Gardner in his book Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice7 and more recently popularized by Goleman in his Emotional Intelligence.8 Goleman discusses five principles of emotional intelligence: (1) knowledge of one’s own emotions; (2) the ability to manage one’s emotions in difficult situations; (3) motivating oneself; (4) the ability to recognize emotions in others; and (5) interpersonal skills. In our survey, the admission committee members repeatedly mentioned these same qualities as desirable attributes of prospective students. The correspondence between the principles of

emotional intelligence and the committee members’ wish lists led us to develop a ‘‘semantic differential’’ instrument for measuring emotional intelligence.9 The semantic differential builds positive versus negative valuation into the instrument by using evaluative items such as good/bad, pleasant/unpleasant, sociable/ unsociable, and friendly/unfriendly. We chose this type of instrument as the measure because it has been useful as an evaluative tool for interviews and conversations in past studies,10,11 and it is better able to draw upon a less consciously monitored connotative meaning than are other more cognitively directed instruments. That second reason is important because emotional intelligence is an attribute not necessarily recognized on a strictly cognitive or rational basis. We derived items for the instrument from admission committee members’ comments and from well-established items used in past interview evaluation research. This instrument (which we refer to as the EI instrument) allows medical schools, in effect, to quantify a qualitative characteristic of their applicants —something McGaghie called for in his article ‘‘Qualitative Variables in Medical School Admissions.’’12 Admission committees grant interviews to applicants based upon the cognitive assessments of grade-point average (GPA) and standardized tests. They then use the interview to assess the applicants’ noncognitive personal and interpersonal skills. After they converse with the applicants face to face, interviewers can complete the EI instrument, with its items founded upon the precepts of emotional intelligence. The admission task force agreed to pilot test the instrument during the 1997 admission interviews. During the pilot test, the instrument was not used to accept or reject applicants; instead, it was used simply to generate data that we later examined for reliability and validity. Validity was examined by comparing EI-generated data with data from

the traditional interview instrument, as well as with the matriculation status and gender of applicants. Those traditional instruments differed from school to school. The instrument used at Kent State, for example, included seven items rated on a fourpoint scale (1 = ‘‘unacceptable medical student’’ to 4 = ‘‘superior medical student’’)—an instrument type commonly used in medical school interviews.13 Those seven items were: integrity, goalsetting skills, commitment to excellence, self-awareness, service orientation, interpersonal skills, and overall assessment. (Similar devices were used by Youngstown and Akron.) The instrument did measure, indirectly, certain aspects of emotional intelligence. For example, the interpersonal skills item included the following note to the interviewer: ‘‘Includes empathy, communication skills, and teamwork and/or leadership skills as appropriate.’’ Although those qualities, viewed separately, may indicate various aspects of emotional intelligence, this instrument clustered them into a single item. That clustering, plus the tendency for interviewers to give most applicants a rating of 4 on most items, made discrimination between the emotional intelligence of applicants difficult if not impossible. The Admission Process and Educational Ethos at NEOUCOM’s Universities Before proceeding with a description of the EI instrument and the analysis of the data, it is necessary to describe NEOUCOM’s admission process and how the three consortium schools differ in educational ethos. Students first apply to the college of arts and sciences at one of the three consortium schools. They are then accepted into that school’s bachelor of science/doctor of medicine (BS/MD) program. The students spend two years at the school of their acceptance, taking a modified schedule of liberal education require-


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ments before beginning their four years of medical training at NEOUCOM. Upon graduation from the program, they are awarded both BS and MD degrees from their consortium school and NEOUCOM, respectively. Acceptance into this program is very competitive. In 1997, the consortium received 1,856 applications from 792 applicants (many applicants apply to all three schools). In a normal year, only 25% of the applicants are granted interviews by one or more of the consortium schools, and only 35 students are accepted into the program at each school. In 1997, 13.3% of the applicants were accepted into the programs. The consortium schools begin by screening out those applicants who do not meet required standards of GPA and standardized test scores (the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and the American College Test (ACT) scores —because students are admitted directly from high school into a six-year combined BS/MD program, they do not take the MCAT until their second year of the program). The remaining students are scheduled for interviews at the consortium school(s) to which they have expressed interest. Each year, 60 or so of the 220 members of the admission committee interview the applicants, working in pairs, usually consisting of one academic and one physician. (As each consortium school designs its own admission procedures, the numbers of interviewers they use vary.) The mixture of MDs and PhDs on the interview teams reduces, as much as possible, professional bias. The committee members are trained by a nationally recognized expert in interviewing skills at seminars sponsored by and conducted at NEOUCOM. Before the 1997 interviews, the committee members viewed a video (featuring author SWG) that introduced the new EI instrument and discussed its background, rationale, and administration. Although each of the consortium universities establishes its own admis-

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sion criteria, their admission procedures tend to be quite similar. However, they are markedly different with regard to what we call educational ethos. Since NEOUCOM’s inception in the early 1970s, its curriculum has emphasized both biomedical knowledge and a social science and humanist orientation. This dual emphasis is an important part of NEOUCOM’s charter. However, this emphasis is not equally shared across the three consortium universities. As mentioned above, BS/MD students spend the first two years of their medical school training at one of the consortium schools. Kent State has designed a strong social scientific and humanities education specifically for its medical students. Its College of Arts and Sciences offers courses taught under the auspices of a specialized department, Integrated Life Sciences. Students must take three sociology and two psychology courses specifically designed for BS/MD students, a community medicine practicum (taught by a sociologist since NEOUCOM’s inception), a medical ethics course taught by a philosopher, and electives in fine arts, history, literature, and philosophy.14 The University of Akron, on the other hand, requires only a community medicine practicum (taught for 20 years by a biologist and only recently by a sociologist), an introductory psychology course, and a course in medicine and the humanities. The remaining hours are electives distributed over humanities, fine and applied arts, and social studies. At Youngstown, students take one required psychology course and a community medicine practicum (taught by a member of the nursing department), and schedule their remaining hours in electives in the social sciences and humanities. Though both Youngstown and Akron offer electives in the social sciences and humanities, these are general courses not tailored specifically to medical students. In comparing the first two years of curriculum for NEOUCOM students, it is evident that the educational ethos differs in

substantial ways across the three universities. Developing the Emotional Intelligence Instrument Our original EI instrument listed 60 word pairs, which we derived from our analysis of the admission committee members’ survey responses and from earlier, standard semantic differential instruments for assessing noncognitive qualities. One example of a word pair is insecure/secure; for that item, an admission committee member would rate the interviewee on a seven-point continuum ranging from insecure to secure. Because this particular list of items had not been previously tested in a semantic differential format and because the admission task force preferred to have an instrument of 25 to 35 items, we pretested the instrument to test its construct validity and to see which items could be eliminated. We asked 112 sociology students at Kent State (both undergraduate and graduate) to use the 60-item instrument to evaluate high-profile individuals: former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders; the euthanasia advocate, Dr. Jack Krevorkian; Nobel Prize winner Mother Teresa; and the discoverer of the polio vaccine, Dr. Jonas Salk. Principal-components analysis guided our reduction of the number of items.15 Using a .50 factor loading as a criterion for the elimination of items in a twodimensional model, we reduced the number of items from 60 to 36. It was this leaner EI instrument that we used in the 1997 admission interviews at two of the NEOUCOM consortium universities: Kent State and Youngstown. (For administrative reasons, Akron did not participate.) A total of 307 interviews were conducted at Kent State and Youngstown, evaluating 187 different applicants. Individual rater bias was reduced by having two or more interviewer assessments for 95% of the applicants. In those cases, item values


were determined by computing the averages of the two interviewers’ ratings. RESULTS After the 1997 interviews were complete, we submitted the 36 items of the EI instrument to a principal-components analysis with varimax rotation in order to determine the most parsimonious grouping of variables.15 Two of the 36 word-pair items dropped out because of low factor loadings ( 1.0 for retaining a principal component, we found that the best solution was a fivedimensional model, which explained 67% of the variance in the observed data. We labeled these dimensions of emotional intelligence maturity, compassion, morality, sociability, and calm disposition. The levels of internal consistency for these five dimensions ranged from fair to excellent, as measured by Cronbach’s reliability coefficient. The numbers of items and coefficient alpha values for the dimensions were: maturity (12, .95); compassion (8, .91); morality (7, .85); sociability (4, .82); calm disposition (3, .66). The remainder of the analysis focused on 147 of the original 187 applicants. For administrative reasons, Youngstown could not provide complete interview data, including data on their traditional interview instrument. We decided to use data collected at Kent State only. This resulted in the loss of 18 applicants who had interviewed at Youngstown but not at Kent State. For another 22 applicants who did interview at Kent State, we could not obtain critical information about gender, race, GPA, ACT, or ratings on the traditional instrument. Also, because participation in the study was voluntary, a small proportion of interviewers did not complete the EI instrument for some applicants. Thus, the final sample is those 147 applicants for whom we had com-

pleted data and who had been interviewed at Kent State. Of those 147 applicants, 39 ended up matriculating at Kent State, 31 matriculated at Akron, 14 matriculated at Youngstown, and 63 were not accepted into the program. The descriptive analysis that follows presents three sets of comparisons: (1) a table of correlations of emotional intelligence with the traditional assessment variables; (2) a means comparison of the traditional assessment variables and emotional intelligence across the three consortium universities; and (3) a means comparison of the traditional assessment variables and emotional intelligence by gender. The traditional assessment variables include the ACT, high school GPA, and Kent State’s traditional interview assessment (TINT). The distributions of these variables have the following characteristics: ACT (mean = 30.99, SD = 2.00); GPA (mean = 3.90, SD = 0.14); TINT (mean = 22.20, SD = 3.50). The distributions of the emotional intelligence variables have the following characteristics: maturity (mean = 65.59, SD = 10.32); compassion (mean = 42.99, SD = 6.51); morality (mean = 40.24, SD = 4.29); sociability (mean = 20.90, SD = 3.54); calm disposition (mean = 13.98,

SD = 2.84). All variables except GPA are approximately normally distributed. Table 1 presents the Pearson correlation coefficients between emotional intelligence and the traditional assessment variables. These variables should be thought of as representing three distinct types of indicators of intelligence. The ACT, a standardized college entrance examination, best measures factual knowledge and analytic skills. The GPA, the average academic performance in a variety of high school classes, mostly measures factual knowledge and analytic skills, but may also measure other kinds of intelligence, including emotional intelligence. The TINT and the EI instrument, based on interviewers’ ratings, mostly measure those personal and interpersonal competencies that are relevant to being a medical student and physician. The results of the bivariate correlations are consistent with our expectations. The low correlations of the ACT and GPA with the scores from the EI instrument combined with the high correlations between four of the emotional intelligence dimensions from our instrument and the TINT support the validity of the EI instrument as measuring what we have described as emo-

Table 1 Correlation Matrix for Traditional Assessment Variables and Emotional Intelligence (EI) Instrument Dimensions Using Data from 147 Applicants to Kent State University, 1997 Traditional Assessment Variables

EI Instrument dimensions Maturity Compassion Morality Sociability Calm disposition EI instrument total

Kent State University’s Traditional Interview Assessment

American College Test

Grade-point Average

0.54 .118 .104 .127 ⫺.094

.207 ⫺.012 .117 .154 .036

.763 .614 .669 .676 .175

.084

.138

.761


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tional intelligence. In other words, the EI instrument is weakly correlated with indicators of factual knowledge and analytic skills, and strongly correlated with the traditional instrument that measures how well a student will perform the social role of being a physician. The one exception to this general trend was the relationship between calm disposition and the TINT. This is not surprising, though, since the TINT contained no item measuring that dimension. In our second assessment of the EI instrument, we conducted a means comparison of the traditional assessment variables and the EI instrument’s dimensions across the applicants’ acceptance status. As discussed above, the three universities differ significantly in educational ethos, as indicated in their curriculum requirements. The results presented in Table 2 lend further support for the validity of the EI instrument. As expected, applicants being ac-

cepted at Kent State had the highest average value for overall emotional intelligence. Those students also had the highest average values for four of the five emotional intelligence dimensions (maturity, compassion, morality, and sociability). Additionally, the variability in the total EI instrument scores among applicants accepted at Kent State (SD = 19.18) was substantially lower than that of those of applicants going to Akron or Youngstown (SD = 27.34 and 23.38, respectively). Those students accepted at Kent State also had the lowest variance on all but the compassion dimension, where the value of the standard deviation was between those for Youngstown and Akron. The combination of having the highest EI instrument scores and the lowest EI instrument variability at Kent State is strong evidence that EI instrument scores do reflect applicants’ attributes most consistent with a social science and humanities educational ethos.

Table 2 also shows that the EI instrument was better than the TINT at identifying students whose orientations best suit a curriculum that emphasizes the social sciences and humanities. Whereas those students accepted at Kent State had the highest average value on the EI instrument, those students accepted at Youngstown had the highest average value on the TINT. For our final assessment of the validity of the EI instrument, we compared the means of the traditional assessment variables and the EI instrument’s dimensions by gender. Women have been observed to be more competent in interpersonal skills.16 Thus, we would expect that if the EI instrument does in fact measure emotional intelligence, women in the sample would demonstrate higher average emotional intelligence scores than would men. Table 3 does show a substantial difference in scores between women and men for

Table 2 Means and Standard Deviations for Traditional Assessment Variables and Emotional Intelligence (EI) Instrument by Consortium School for 147 Applicants Who Were Interviewed at Kent State University, 1997* 39 Applicants Who Matriculated at Kent State University

31 Applicants Who Matriculated at the University of Akron

14 Applicants Who Matriculated at Youngstown State University

63 Applicants Not Accepted at Any of the Three Universities

All 147 Applicants

Variable

Mean

SD

Mean

SD

Mean

SD

Mean

SD

Mean

SD

American College Test Grade-point average Kent State University’s traditional interview assessment EI instrument total

30.10 3.90

1.85 0.14

31.58 3.92

2.08 0.12

31.57 3.88

2.10 0.20

31.13 3.90

1.89 0.13

30.99 3.90

2.00 0.14

22.21 186.52

3.26 19.17

21.31 177.28

3.96 27.34

22.60 182.68

3.63 23.38

22.56 185.34

3.38 23.12

22.20 183.70

3.50 23.17

66.78 43.67 40.60 21.23 14.23

7.90 6.13 3.90 2.75 2.72

63.08 41.39 39.26 20.16 13.40

12.39 7.91 4.98 4.13 3.40

64.61 43.20 40.28 20.16 14.44

10.64 4.90 4.09 3.43 3.20

66.30 43.32 40.48 21.22 14.02

10.47 6.31 4.23 3.69 2.54

65.59 42.99 40.24 20.90 13.98

10.32 6.51 4.29 3.54 2.84

El instrument dimensions Maturity Compassion Morality Sociability Calm disposition

*All 147 applicants in the analysis were interviewed at Kent State University, and the data are derived from those interviews. However, many applicants were also interviewed at Akron and Youngstown and, in the end, matriculated there.

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Table 3 Means and Standard Deviations for Traditional Assessment Variables and Emotional Intelligence (EI) Instrument, by Gender, for 147 Applicants Who Were Interviewed at Kent State University, 1997 83 Women Applicants

64 Men Applicants

All 147 Applicants

Variable

Mean

SD

Mean

SD

Mean

SD

American College Test Grade-point average Kent State University’s traditional interview assessment EI instrument total

30.58 3.92

1.76 0.11

31.53 3.89

2.17 0.17

30.99 3.90

2.00 0.14

22.88 189.23

2.98 19.90

21.33 176.52

3.94 25.23

22.20 183.70

3.51 23.17

68.06 44.19 41.12 21.60 14.25

8.37 6.47 3.97 3.32 2.66

62.38 41.44 39.08 19.99 13.63

11.70 6.27 4.45 3.65 3.04

65.59 42.99 40.24 20.90 13.98

10.32 6.51 4.29 3.54 2.84

El instrument dimensions Maturity Compassion Morality Sociability Calm disposition

emotional intelligence, as well as a substantial difference in variation. The women’s average value on every emotional intelligence dimension was higher than the men’s. Additionally, the variance in the distributions of all but the compassion dimension were substantially smaller for women than for men. For the overall scale, the standard deviation for the women was 19.90, while for the men it was 25.23. This combined difference of higher scores and less variation for women lends additional evidence that the EI instrument is able to measure emotional intelligence in medical school applicants. DISCUSSION The results of this pilot study demonstrate that the EI instrument identifies applicants who are oriented toward the social sciences and humanities and who have those qualities of emotional intelligence—maturity, compassion, morality, sociability, and calm disposition—

that indicate competency in personal and interpersonal skills. The results were consistent across the three comparative analyses we conducted: bivariate correlations between emotional intelligence and the traditional assessment variables, and means and variance comparisons of emotional intelligence and the traditional assessment variables across consortium schools and by gender. It is logical that medical schools such as NEOUCOM, which focus their training on primary care with a strong emphasis on clinical interpersonal skills, would want to take account of applicants’ personal and interpersonal competencies in their admission decisions. Our instrument appears to make that possible and thus meets the directive that initiated this process: to improve the interview procedures with specific attention to the personal and interpersonal qualities and abilities of medical school applicants and to provide a specific means for accomplishing this. Because of the unique structure of

NEOUCOM, we had the opportunity to compare emotional intelligence across schools that have different degrees of emphasis on the social sciences and humanities. We found that emotional intelligence is related to an educational program that includes a strong emphasis on the social sciences and humanities. The social science and humanities orientation filters into the ethos of admission committee members, who are then more likely to select applicants based on emotional-intelligence criteria. In this regard we must conclude that emotional intelligence indicates an educational outlook that is broader than the biomedical orientation. Obviously, then, this measure provides a specific tool for medical schools that want to take into account applicants’ competency in interpersonal skills and potential fit with a medical education that includes the social sciences and humanities. As with all studies, this one has limitations. The first limitation in this pilot study is the nature of the sample. Due to a combination of administrative restrictions regarding the development of this instrument, we did not have data for the entire cohort of students who were actually interviewed. We simply cannot know how this limitation may or may not have affected our data. Because of this limitation, we had to restrict our analysis of the sample to a descriptive one. A second limitation is one that can be remedied only by further research that incorporates repeated assessments of emotional intelligence of medical school candidates again when they are in medical school, and again as practicing physicians. At this time we can only assume that persons high on emotional intelligence will perform the interpersonal dimension of being a physician better than those scoring low. Findings by Elam and Johnson17 do show slightly better performance in clinical skills by medical students who score high on the interview component of the admission process.


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CONCLUSION Medical education must change to meet the changing health care needs of the population and the changing demands of patients. It is widely acknowledged that medical schools must increase their emphasis on primary care, as well as improve the overall competency of medical students in the interpersonal dimension of practicing medicine. As Wallace18 has argued, the real issue regarding the relationship between the public and the institution of medicine is trust: ‘‘An essential way for medical schools to help restore public trust is to select and nurture professionals who see medicine in a broad social context, who have learned to listen to feedback, who are capable of responding and communicating clearly and honestly in those areas and about those issues where they are uniquely qualified to contribute.’’ One step in the direction of restoring the public trust might be to enhance or change admission criteria. In this article, we provide evidence for the ability of an instrument of emotional intelli-

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gence to measure those attributes that indicate desirable personal and interpersonal skills in medical school applicants. It is our hope that this measure will be useful to that end.

REFERENCES 1. Flexner A. Medical Education in the United States and Canada. New York: The Carnegie Foundation, 1910. 2. McGaghie WC. Perspectives on medical school admission. Acad Med. 1990;65:136– 9. 3. Inui TS, Williams WT, Goode L, et al. Sustaining the development of primary care in academic medicine. Acad Med. 1998;73: 245–57. 4. Spooner CE. Help for the gatekeepers: comment and summation on the admission process. Acad Med. 1990;65:183–7. 5. Salovey P, Mayer JD. Emotional intelligence. Imagination, Cognition, and Personality. 1990;9:185–211. 6. Mayer JD, Salovey P. The intelligence of emotional intelligence. Intelligence. 1993;17: 433–42. 7. Gardner H. Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice. New York: Basic Books, 1993. 8. Goleman D. Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam Books, 1995.

9. Osgood CG, Suci J, Tannenbaum PH. The Measurement of Meaning. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1957. 10. Gregory SW, Webster S, Huang G. Voice pitch and amplitude convergence as a metric of quality in dyadic interviews. Language and Communication. 1993;13:195–217. 11. Gregory SW, Dagan K, Webster S. Evaluating the relation of vocal accommodation in conversation partners’ fundamental frequencies to perceptions of communication quality. J Nonverbal Behav. 1997;21(1):23–43. 12. McGaghie WC. Qualitative variables in medical schools admissions. Acad Med. 1990;65: 145–8. 13. Johnson EK, Edwards JC. Current practices in admission interviews at U.S. medical schools. Acad Med. 1991;66:408–12. 14. Gregory SW, O’Toole R. Teaching sociological research methods to medical students. Teaching Sociology. 1987;15:128–35. 15. Dunteman GH. Principal Components Analysis. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1989. 16. Raty H, Snellman L. Does gender make any difference? Commonsense conceptions of intelligence. Soc Behav Pers. 1992;20(1):23– 34. 17. Elam CL, Johnson MMS. Prediction of medical students’ academic performances: does the admission interview help? Acad Med. 1992;67(10 suppl):S28–S30. 18. Wallace AG. Educating tomorrow’s doctors: the thing that really matters is that we care. Acad Med. 1997;72:253–8.


APPENDIX Semantic Differential Items for the Emotional Intelligence Instrument by Dimension Maturity Insecure Unsure Comfortable Definite Mature Clear Unaware Stable Irrelevant Uncommitted Incompetent Real

Compassion ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

Secure Sure Uncomfortable* Uncertain* Immature* Hazy* Aware Erratic* Relevant Committed Competent Unreal*

Like Fake Helpful Empathetic Unforgiving Sharing Sensitive Humble

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

Dislike* Genuine Aloof* Self-centered* Compassionate Selfish* Insensitive* Arrogant*

Morality Worthless . . . Valuable Irresponsible . . . Responsible Meaningful . . . Meaningless*

Right Good Dishonest Immoral

... ... ... ...

Wrong* Bad* Honest Moral

... ... ... ...

High Cold* Sociable Sad*

Sociability Low Warm Unsociable Happy Calm disposition Relaxed . . . Tense* Excitable . . . Calm Moving . . . Still

Note 1. Items should be arranged randomly before administration of the instrument. Note 2. The raters places a check mark in one of seven boxes between the alternatives [here represented by ellipses]. The choices are later assigned values between 1 and 7. *These items must be reverse-coded before analyzing data.


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