Clinician communication behaviors and patient (or surrogate) emotion and decision making.

The figure describes the relationships I hypothesize between

clinician’s communication behaviors, patient/surrogate emotion, comprehension, treatment decisions, and decisional conflict. I hypothesize that the
patient’s (or surrogate’s) emotional state influence treatment decisions. This influence may be direct; emotions have been shown to evoke specific “action
tendencies”66 and “appraisal tendencies”19,20—propensities to perceive the world in specific ways. Or this influence may be indirect; emotions could
generate high levels of arousal that interfere with the patient’s (or surrogate’s) ability to retain and process information from the clinician, thereby impacting
comprehension.
Further, I hypothesize that if communication best-practices “work,” they do so
Citation: Chapter 13 Emotion and Decision Making in the Clinical Encounter, Schwartz R, Hall JA, Osterberg LG. Emotion in the Clinical Encounter; 2021. Available at: https://accessmedicine.mhmedical.com/content.aspx?bookid=3088&sectionid=257489697 Accessed: December 29, 2022

principally by influencing emotion, rather than by influencing comprehension of

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