Cue-responding in a simulated bad news situation: Exploring a stress hypothesis

The stress-coping paradigm of Folkman and Lazarus (1984) was applied to investigate if the communicative reactions of the physician in a bad news transaction are related to the stressfulness of the situation. A standardized video bad news consultation was presented to 88 medical students. To examine their communicative reactions we selected 10 patient cues with different levels of expressed emotion to which the participants responded from the physician's point of view. A strongly positive relationship between expressed emotion and perceived difficulty of the cues and a gender effect occurred, confirming that handling emotions is stressful for physicians. The reluctance of physicians to address the emotionally laden issues of the consultation can be understood as a lack of a frame of reference. The problem-solving strategies, which they apply in the instrumental domain of the consultation, are ineffective when dealing with psychosocial suffering.