Impact of emotional competence on clinical reasoning: a scoping review
Louise Joly, Alexandra Nunes de Sousa, Marjorie Bardiau, Valérie Dory, Marie Bayot, Anne-Laure Lenoir · 2026
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Description
Joly and co-authors map what research says about doctors' emotional skills and the quality of their medical reasoning. Their 2026 BMJ Open scoping review defines emotional competence as the ability to spot, understand, express, manage, and use emotions. The team searched three major databases plus hand-found sources, with no date limits.
From more than twelve thousand records screened, ninety-eight studies met the rules for inclusion. Emotional skill helped most with handling uncertainty, quick intuitive judgment, and performance during life-threatening emergencies. Benefits were strongest under heavy stress, likely because calming emotions frees mental capacity for reasoning. Evidence outside emergencies, and evidence for patient outcomes, stayed thin, which the authors flag as the key gap for future work.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Louise Joly, Alexandra Nunes de Sousa, Marjorie Bardiau, Valérie Dory, Marie Bayot, Anne-Laure Lenoir |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 42 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |