Physicians' psychophysiological stress reaction in medical communication of bad news: A critical literature review

- Studies on physicians' psychophysiological stress when breaking bad news are reviewed.
- Physicians show increased psychopsychological activation when breaking bad news.
- Breaking bad news is an arousing and stressful task in the medical profession.
- Future directions to advance the field are discussed.

IntroductionStress is a common phenomenon in medical professions. Breaking bad news (BBN) is reported to be a particularly distressing activity for physicians. Traditionally, the stress experienced by physicians when BBN was assessed exclusively using self-reporting. Only recently, the field of difficult physician-patient communication has used physiological assessments to better understand physicians' stress reactions.MethodThis paper's goals are to (a) review current knowledge about the physicians' psychophysiological stress reactions in BBN situations, (b) discuss methodological aspects of these studies and (c) suggest directions for future research.ResultsThe seven studies identified all used scenarios with simulated patients but were heterogeneous with regard to other methodological aspects, such as the psychophysiological parameters, time points and durations assessed, comparative settings, and operationalisation of the communication scenarios. Despite this heterogeneity, all the papers reported increases in psychological and/or physiological activation when breaking bad news in comparison to control conditions, such as history taking or breaking good news.ConclusionTaken together, the studies reviewed support the hypothesis that BBN is a psychophysiologically arousing and stressful task for medical professionals. However, much remains to be done. We suggest several future directions to advance the field. These include (a) expanding and refining the conceptual framework, (b) extending assessments to include more diverse physiological parameters, (c) exploring the modulatory effects of physicians' personal characteristics (e.g. level of experience), (d) comparing simulated and real-life physician-patient encounters and (e) combining physiological assessment with a discourse analysis of physician-patient communication.