Emotionally salient patient information enhances the educational value of surgical videos

Medical students’ motivations for choosing a medical career are likely based on and remain tethered to the affectively-laden caring component of doctor–patient interactions. However, this component is rarely presented in educational surgical videos. It is unknown whether affectively engaging students by including patient-related emotionally salient information potentiates or draws focus away from learning a surgical procedure and whether such information affects motivation and attitudes toward the video. Therefore, we investigate whether presenting a patient’s emotional state before video surgery enhances or weakens the educational value of that video. In a within-subjects crossover design, second-year medical students (n = 130) viewed video clips of surgeries. These videos, from online medical education platforms, were preceded by the patient’s information from the original video or by information about the patient’s preoperative emotional preparation. After each video, participants completed a multiple-choice test about the video’s content to measure learning, answered a question about their motivation to re-watch the video, and completed an attitude scale regarding the video. Incorporating patient’s information into surgical videos significantly enhanced students’ acquisition of the technical aspects of surgery procedures (p < 0.0001), motivation to re-watch the video (p < 0.001), and favorable attitudes toward the video (p = 0.02). These findings show that incorporating information about patients’ emotional states may enhance students’ positive attitudes and motivations toward educational videos and may improve their learning of surgical techniques. They also suggest that the role of this factor should be considered when developing guidelines for medical educational video release.