How oncologists’ communication impacts patients’ information recall and emotional stress A video-vignettes approach

The main goal of the research described in this thesis was to investigate the impact of oncologists’ communication during medical consultations on patients’ recall of information provided in those consultations, with a special focus on the possible mediating role of emotional stress in this relation. The experimental video-vignettes design using analogue patients is an appropriate methodology to systematically investigate the hypothesized causal relationships. Still, we first set out to optimize the ecological validity of our video-vignettes studies by investigating the impact of several methodological decisions on analogue patients’ engagement.
This thesis is therefore divided into two parts:
PART I - The video-vignette approach
PART II - How oncologists’ communication impacts patients’ information recall and emotional stress
The research presented in this thesis provided evidence for the causal and positive influence of oncologists’ trust-conveying and emotion-oriented communication on respectively patients’ free recall and recognition of medical information. In addition, the results indicate that the reduction of emotional stress might not be the underlying mechanism through which physicians’ communication influences patients’ information recall. Nevertheless, our findings suggest that other mechanisms can play a role; the effective component could be (extra) time.
Showing evidence that affect-oriented communication strategies can improve patients’ ability to recall highly relevant information may encourage oncologists, and physicians in general, to adopt such strategies. Furthermore, these findings can inform medical communication skills training, and therefore contribute to high-quality, evidence-based medical care.