Measuring emotions in medical students: validation of the Japanese version of the medical emotion scale

Medical learners’ achievement emotions during educational activities remain unexamined in medical education research in Japan for many reasons, including a lack of assessment tools in Japanese that have been validated in Japanese medical educational contexts. The Medical Emotion Scale (MES) was developed to assess the achievement emotions of Canadian medical learners during learning activities in computer-based and live simulation environments. The goal of this study was to create and validate a Japanese version of the Medical Emotion Scale (J-MES). The MES was translated into Japanese using the Translation, Review, Adjudication, Pretest, and Documentation team translation model. We then conducted two initial validation studies of the J-MES. In the first pilot study, we asked five, native-Japanese, second-year medical student volunteers to assess their emotions with the J-MES during the same computer-based clinical reasoning activity that was used to develop the Canadian MES. Each participant was then interviewed to assess the clarity and suitability of the descriptions and the usability of the format. In a second larger study of the J-MES 41 Japanese medical students were recruited to assess their achievement emotions, appraisals, performances, and self-efficacy perceptions during the same the technology-based clinical reasoning task. We also conducted individual semi-structured interviews with ten of these participants to explore potential cross-cultural differences in achievement emotions between Japanese and North American medical students. Part 1 of the pilot study demonstrated that the descriptions contained in the J-MES were clear and that the scale captured an appropriate range of emotions perceived by students during the task. The second larger study revealed that emotions measured using the J-MES correlated with theoretically relevant constructs (e.g., appraisals, performance) of control-value theory. The results also revealed that the profiles and the internal structure of the scale were largely consistent with emotion theory. A few items, such as culture and learning environment (i.e., pride, compassion, and surprise), on the J-MES were found to be context-dependent. Our findings indicated that the emotions assessed using J-MES aligned with the control value theory and clearly demonstrated the scoring capacity, generalizability, and extrapolability of the J-MES. Further investigation is needed to confirm the robustness and cross-cultural validity of the J-MES to expand its applications

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.