Correlation and Interaction between Emotional Intelligence and Temperament Factors in Medical Resident Doctors in a Tertiary Care Teaching Hospital in Central India - A Cross Sectional Survey

BACKGROUND Emotional intelligence and temperament are important parts of medical practice in good clinical history taking, diagnosis, effective treatment, and in managing the extreme situations in the workplace. This is more important in young resident doctors who lack the experience in handling patients. The primary objective of this study is to evaluate the four different aspects of emotional intelligence and their correlation with different temperamental factors in medical resident doctors. METHODS This is a cross sectional study. Students pursuing higher medical education were assessed for temperament and emotional intelligence. Purposefully selected participants were given temperament scale and emotional intelligence scale for their assessment. The four components of emotional intelligence were correlated with the 15 temperamental factors. RESULTS In this study medical residents were found to be low / very low on temperamental scale on all 15 parameters and are average on emotional intelligence score on all four parameters. There is a positive correlation between all temperamental factors and emotional intelligence factors except secretiveness and aggressiveness, which show negative correlation. When various subfactors of temperament were correlated with grand emotional intelligence, sociability, vigorous, cooperative, persistence and tolerance showed moderate strength of correlation ranging from 0.36 to 0.5. In comparison between male and female residents, factors like acceptability, responsibility and persistence were predominant in males while sociability, ascendant, placid, vigorous and tolerance were predominant in female resident doctors. CONCLUSIONS In this study medical residents were found to be are low / very low on temperamental scale and average on emotional intelligence. There is moderate correlation between grand emotional intelligence and grand temperamental score. There is no gender factor influence when head-to-head comparison was done but individual gender wise correlation analysis has shown that emotional intelligence correlates differently to temperamental factors in both genders. KEYWORDS Emotional Intelligence, Temperament, Correlation, Medical Residents, Gender Correlation