Empathy and Personality Traits of Medical Doctors Working in the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic doctors use their intellectual and personal potential in order to be effective in their work, as they were placed in a situation with special requirements for professional activity, creating an emotionally charged environment. Empathy, emotional intelligence (EI), and emotional stability play an important role. Our objective was to study the relationship between empathy, EI, intuition, attitudes toward uncertainty and personality traits in doctors performing their professional activities during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study involved 122 doctors of different specialties (psychiatrists, pediatricians, surgeons, oncologists, etc.). Six questionnaires were used. The Jefferson Scale of Empathy and confirmatory factor analysis were used to verify the factor structure, where the original three-factor model showed the best fit. To identify the relationships between the variables, the Spearman test was used. In our sample of medical doctors, emotional stability characterizes individuals with high self-control and sociality (TEIQue scales). Our data allows us to highlight that empathy fails to be integrated with traits of emotional intelligence in the personality profiles of medical doctors. But distancing from the sphere of one’s experiences in interpersonal relationships during the COVID pandemic may be a necessary component in the personal regulation of the performance of one’s professional responsibilities.