The Roles of Emotional Intelligence, Neuroticism, and Academic Stress on the Relationship Between Psychological Distress and Burnout in Medical Students

Abstract

Background: Stress and burnout commonly threaten the mental health of medical students in Malaysia and elsewhere. This study aimed to explore the interrelations of psychological distress, emotional intelligence, personality traits, academic stress, and burnout among medical students. A cross-sectional study was conducted with 241 medical students. Validated questionnaires were administered to measure burnout, psychological distress, emotional intelligence, personality traits, and academic stress, respectively. A structural equation modelling analysis was performed by AMOS. Results: The results suggested a structural model with good fit indices, in which psychological distress and academic stress were noted to have direct and indirect effects on burnout. The burnout levels significantly increased with the rise of psychological distress (p-value < 0.01) and academic stress (p-value < 0.01). Neuroticism was only found to have significant indirect effects on burnout, whereby burnout increased when neuroticism increased (p-value < 0.010). Emotional intelligence had a significant direct effect on lowering burnout with the incremental increase of emotional intelligence (p-value < 0.05), but it was significantly reduced by psychological distress and neuroticism (p-value < 0.001). Conclusion: This study showed significant effects that psychological distress, emotional intelligence, academic stress, and neuroticism have on burnout. Academic stress and neuroticism significantly increased psychological distress, leading to an increased burnout level, while emotional intelligence had a significant direct effect on reducing burnout; however, this relationship was compromised by psychological distress and neuroticism, leading to increased burnout. Several practical recommendations for medical educators, medical students, and medical schools are discussed.

The Influence of E-Learning and Emotional Intelligence on Psychological Intentions: Study of Stranded Pakistani Students

“…Bar-On et al (2006) found that higher than average intellectual skills are more successful in coping with environmental and psychological pressure situations. EI indicated a direct effect to reduce the burnout level among the students during stressful environments; consequently, a high level of EI was significantly correlated with the performance of students (Yusoff et al, 2021). It is reasonably acceptable that several studies explored the relationship between EI on the work outcomes of nurses (Ioannidou and Konstantikaki, 2008;Alonazi, 2020;Mo et al, 2020).…”

Personality Traits and their Effects among University Students in Malaysia: A Systematic Review

“…In brief, this review found common suggestions such as that future research should consider varied (Abdollahi et al, 2022;Cornelius & Ng, 2019;Othman et al, 2017;Yusoff et al, 2021), larger samples (Bhagat et al, 2016;Bhagat et al, 2019;Chung et al, 2019;Cornelius & Ng, 2019;Othman et al, 2017;Sam et al, 2022;Yusof et al, 2016) for the reason that single institution studies commonly has low generalisability (Abdollahi et al, 2022;Bhagat et al, 2016;Sam et al, 2022;Toh et al, 2022;Yew Shen et al, 2022). Also, this review also found 18 studies to have employed cross-sectional method in which a single population was observed at one point in time (Wang & Cheng, 2020).…”

“…Summarily, this review has found personality traits to have an influence on pathological online use (Chung et al, 2019;Klobas et al, 2018), students' academic performance (Bhagat et al, 2016;Bhagat et al, 2019) and student's online social usage motivation (Naqshbandi et al, 2017;Ali et al, 2016), student's coping strategies (Sam et al, 2022;Zainah et al, 2019), language learning (Zarina et al, 2019), students level of stress (Toh et al, 2022;Yusof et al, 2016;Yusoff et al, 2021), general anxiety, social anxiety (Abdollahi et al, 2022), burnout level (Yusoff et al, 2021), and symptoms of depression during times of crises (Yusoff et al, 2013;Zainah et al, 2019), neuronal signature of self-consciousness (Hassan et al, 2016), happiness (Tan et al, 2018), and other addictive behaviors such as smoking method preference (Yew et al, 2022), smartphone addiction (Lei et al, 2020), and internet addiction (Othman et al, 2017) which tends to lead to psychological problems (Lei et al, 2020;Yusoff et al, 2021) such as depression (Lei et al, 2020).…”

“…Precisely, trait neuroticism was linked to many deviant behaviors and negative outcomes. Neuroticism was found to predispose students to addictive behaviors (Othman et al, 2017;Lei et al, 2020;Yew et al, 2022), higher stress level (Toh et al, 2022;Yusof et al, 2016;Yusoff et al, 2021), increased social anxiety (Abdollahi et al, 2022), lower exam scores (Bhagat et al, 2016;Bhagat et al, 2019), and increased burnout level (Yusoff et al, 2021) as compared to other personality traits.…”

“…Regarding sampling bias, Yusoff et al (2021) and Bhagat et al (2016) noted that future research should observe limitations of non-probability technique, which is subjected to sampling bias. Future studies could consider probability sampling techniques to address this limitation (Yusoff et al, 2021).…”