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Objective-One might speculate that radiologists who enjoy mammography may exhibit better performance than radiologists who do not.Materials and Methods-One hundred thirty-one radiologists at three Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium (BCSC) registries completed a survey about their characteristics, clinical practices, and attitudes related to screening mammography. Survey results were linked with BCSC performance data for 662,084 screening and 33,977 diagnostic mammograms. Using logistic regression, we modeled the odds of an abnormal interpretation, cancer detection, sensitivity, and specificity among radiologists who reported they enjoy interpreting screening mammograms compared with those who do not.Results-Overall, 44.3% of radiologists reported not enjoying interpreting screening mammograms. Radiologists who reported enjoying interpreting screening mammograms were more likely to be women, spend at least 20% of their time in breast imaging, have a primary academic affiliation, read more than 2,000 mammograms per year, and be salaried. Enjoyment was not associated with screening mammography performance. Among diagnostic mammograms, there was a significant increase in sensitivity among radiologists who reported enjoyment (85.2%) compared with those who did not (78.2%). In models adjusting for radiologist characteristics, similar trends were found; however, no statistically significant associations remained.Conclusion-Almost one half of radiologists actively interpreting mammograms do not enjoy that part of their job. Once we adjusted for radiologist and patient characteristics, we found that reported enjoyment was not related to performance in our study, although suggestive trends were noted. Keywordsbreast cancer screening; breast imaging specialists; mammographers; practice of radiology; radiologists; screening mammography Address correspondence to B. M. Geller (berta.geller@uvm.edu). NIH Public AccessAuthor Manuscript AJR Am J Roentgenol. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2010 February 18. Published in final edited form as:AJR Am J Roentgenol. 2009 February ; 192(2): 361-369. doi:10.2214/AJR.08.1647. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author ManuscriptThe declining numbers of radiologists willing to provide mammography services [1][2][3] and the increasing evidence suggesting wide variability in their performance [4,5] raised the question of whether mammography performance is associated with radiologists' enjoyment of interpreting screening mammograms. Given the negative incentives for joining the breast imaging field [6], one might speculate that radiologists who enjoy mammography are more likely to remain in the field and may exhibit better performance than radiologists who do not. However, we know of no studies that have tested this idea.Radiologists in general are satisfied with their professional choice of specialty, with 93% reporting that they enjoy their career [7]. In the single published study on career satisfaction related to mammography, Lewis et al. [8] reported t...