The goal was to explore the clinical relevance of accurate understanding of patients' thoughts and feelings. Between 2010 and 2012, four groups of participants (nursing students, medical students, internal medicine residents, and undergraduate students) took a test of accuracy in understanding the thoughts and feelings of patients who were videorecorded during their actual medical visits and who afterward reviewed their video to identify their thoughts and feelings as they occurred (Test of Accurate Perception of Patients' Affect, or TAPPA). Participants' accuracy scores were then correlated with participants' attitudes toward patient-centered care, clinical course background, recall of clinical conversation, evaluations of clinical performance made by preceptors, evaluations of interpersonal skill made by standardized patients in clinical encounters, and independent coding of behavior in a clinical encounter. Accuracy in understanding patients' thoughts and feelings was significantly correlated with nursing students' clinical course experience, clinicians' favorable attitudes to psychosocial discussion, standardized patients' evaluations of medical students' interpersonal skill, independent coding of medical students' patient-centered behavior while taking a social history, and undergraduates' more accurate recall of what an actor-physician said on video. Accuracy in perceiving patients' thoughts and feelings can be objectively measured and is a skill relevant to clinical performance.

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Patients benefit when their healthcare providers accurately recognize their affect. The efficacy of three short‐term training components, practice, practice with feedback, and discussion with practice and feedback, to improve accuracy for judging patients' affect was experimentally assessed. Undergraduate participants were randomly assigned in pairs to one of the training conditions or an untrained control condition and the effect of training was measured using the Test of Accurate Perception of Patients' Affect (TAPPA). Participants were significantly more accurate on the TAPPA in the discussion with feedback and practice condition compared with the control condition. There was a significant linear trend in accuracy across training elements. Results suggest that a 40‐min discussion with feedback and practice training can significantly improve interpersonal accuracy.