TUDIES HAVE LINKED PHYSICIANS' communication skills to a variety of positive outcomes, including patient and physician satisfaction, higher levels of adherence to therapeutic recommendations, improved physiological indicators of disease control, and enhanced physical and mental health status. 1-3 Within this context, gender has stimulated a good deal of interest as a possible source of variation in the interpersonal aspects of medical practice, with speculation that female physicians facilitate more open and equal exchange and a different therapeutic milieu from that of male physicians. 4-7 Outside of the medical context, differences in the interpersonal style of women compared with men are well documented. 8-11 Women disclose more information about themselves in conversation, 10 they have a warmer and more engaged style of nonverbal communication, 8 and they encourage and facilitate others to talk to them more freely and in a warmer and more intimate way. 8 There is also evidence that women take greater pains to downplay their own status in an attempt to equalize status with a partner, in contrast with men's tendency to assert status differences. 11 Despite gender differences in routine conversation, it is not known whether "female-linked" conversational styles are

We outline the need to, and provide a guide on how to, conduct a meta-analysis on one's own studies within a manuscript. Although conducting a "mini meta" within one's manuscript has been argued for in the past, this practice is still relatively rare and adoption is slow. We believe two deterrents are responsible. First, researchers may not think that it is legitimate to do a meta-analysis on a small number of studies. Second, researchers may think a meta-analysis is too complicated to do without expert knowledge or guidance. We dispel these two misconceptions by (1) offering arguments on why researchers should be encouraged to do mini metas, (2) citing previous articles that have conducted such analyses to good effect, and (3) providing a user-friendly guide on calculating some metaanalytic procedures that are appropriate when there are only a few studies. We provide formulas for calculating effect sizes and converting effect sizes from one metric to another (e.g., from Cohen's d to r), as well as annotated Excel spreadsheets and a step-by-step guide on how to conduct a simple meta-analysis. A series of related studies can be strengthened and better understood if accompanied by a mini meta-analysis.

This article summarizes results of 7S studies that reported accuracy for males and females at decoding nonverbal communication. The following attributes of the studies were coded: year, sample size, age of judges, sex of stimulus person(s), age of stimulus person(s), and the medium and channel of communication (e.g., photos of facial expressions, filtered speech). These attributes were examined in relation to three outcome indices: direction of effect, effect size (in SD units), and significance level. Results showed that more studies showed female advantage than would occur by chance, the average effect was of moderate magnitude and was significantly larger than zero, and more studies reached a conventional level of significance than would be expected by chance. The gender effect for visual-plus-auditory studies was significantly larger than for visual-only and auditory-only studies. The magnitude of the gender effect did not vary reliably with sample size, age of judges, sex of stimulus person(s), or age of stimulus person(s).

The vertical dimension of interpersonal relations (relating to dominance, power, and status) was examined in association with nonverbal behaviors that included facial behavior, gaze, interpersonal distance, body movement, touch, vocal behaviors, posed encoding skill, and others. Results were separately summarized for people's beliefs (perceptions) about the relation of verticality to nonverbal behavior and for actual relations between verticality and nonverbal behavior. Beliefs/perceptions were stronger and much more prevalent than were actual verticality effects. Perceived and actual relations were positively correlated across behaviors. Heterogeneity was great, suggesting that verticality is not a psychologically uniform construct in regard to nonverbal behavior. Finally, comparison of the verticality effects to those that have been documented for gender in relation to nonverbal behavior revealed only a limited degree of parallelism.

No single strategy or programmatic focus showed any clear advantage compared with another. Comprehensive interventions combining cognitive, behavioral, and affective components were more effective than single-focus interventions.

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Key Words literature review, physician-patient communication, meta-analysis, physician-patient relationship, medical dialogue s Abstract Physician gender has stimulated a good deal of interest as a possible source of variation in the interpersonal aspects of medical practice, with speculation that female physicians are more patient-centered in their communication with patients. Our objective is to synthesize the results of two meta-analytic reviews the effects of physician gender on communication in medical visits within a communication framework that reflects patient-centeredness and the functions of the medical visit. We performed online database searches of English-language abstracts for the years 1967 to 2001 (MEDLINE, AIDSLINE, PsycINFO, and BIOETHICS), and a hand search was conducted of reprint files and the reference sections of review articles and other publications. Studies using a communication data source such as audiotape, videotape, or direct observation were identified through bibliographic and computerized searches. Medical visits with female physicians were, on average, two minutes (10%) longer than those of male physicians. During this time, female physicians engaged in significantly more communication that can be considered patient-centered. They engaged in more active partnership behaviors, positive talk, psychosocial counseling, psychosocial question asking, and emotionally focused talk. Moreover, the patients of female physicians spoke more overall, disclosed more biomedical and psychosocial information, and made more positive statements to their physicians than did the patients of male physicians. Obstetrics and gynecology may present a pattern different from that of primary care: Male physicians demonstrated higher levels of emotionally focused talk than their female colleagues. Female primary care physicians and their patients engaged in more communication that can be considered patient-centered and had longer visits than did their male colleagues. Limited studies exist outside of primary care, and gender-related practice patterns might differ in some subspecialties from those evident in primary care.