Personality correlates of a career interest in psychiatry.

Career preferences among medical students are less influenced by the instruction provided than medical educators like to recognize. To a surprising extent career choice antedates the relevant training exposure, existing already in early medical school years (Schumacher, 1964). Career choice has been linked with personality type. “¿ Individualswho choose different types of medical careers have measurably different personal characteristics at the time they enter medical school.― The Edinburgh students who were the subjects of the present investigation were asked, “¿ Have you decided yet on the nature of your eventual career in medicine?― (Walton, 1967). Only a small proportion, ioper cent., had reached a firm decision; 47 per cent. said that they were fairly decided. Almost half were undecided, 28 per cent. reporting that they had done no more than exclude some possibilities, and 15 per cent. describing their minds as completely open about their future careers. Four personality attributes have been em phasized in relation to psychiatric career choice in the literature on medical education and specialty recruitment. First, personal warmth and the capacity for easy personal relationships are a quality found in good psychiatrists-in-training, but not in poor ones (Holt and Luborsky, :958). Numerous writers setting up criteria for selection of psychiatrists have held that psychiatrists require the ability for effective contacts with others (Knight, †̃¿ 947; Abel et al., 1956). Extraversion—introversion is thus a personality dimension which requires attention in an exploration of psychiatric career preference. A number of reports give prominence to a second personality attribute, emotional instability. Findings vary according to whether the evaluators are psychiatrists on the one hand, or non-psychiatrists on the other hand. Among psychoanalysts-in-training at Columbia, only those performing poorly had been rated on intake by their psychoanalyst teachers as emotionally disturbed (Burdock, Cheek and Zubin, :960). But medical students as a body do not single out poor psychiatrists as psycho logically unstable; students report that psy chiatrists in general appear as more emotionally unstable than their other teachers (Bruhn and Parsons, :964). Medical students at Colorado, askedtoselectadjectives typically characterizing psychiatrists, included the terms: complicated, temperamental, and emotional (Hammond and Kern, 1959). The third dimension of personality explored in this investigation, intolerance of ambiguity, has been linked with precarious subjective balance. Persons unable to tolerate ambiguities have been categorized as prejudiced and resistant to perception of external discrepancies; their resort to black and white solutions reflects the multiplicity of conflicts and confusions present in the prejudiced (Frenkel-Brunswik, †̃¿ 949). Tolerance of ambiguity, however, has been viewed not as a quality germane only to psychiatrists, but as an attribute necessary in all doctors (Fox, 1957). The doctor must function in circumstances which are only partly comprehensible, coping as best he can with methods, instruments, and ideas of the moment (Romano, 1961). In an investigation of experienced general practitioners (Walton, :966), the psychologically-oriented doctors and the organically-oriented doctors were similarly tolerant of ambiguous situations.