BackgroundVerbal and non-verbal aspects of communication as well as empathy are known to have an important impact on the medical encounter. The aim of the study was to analyze how well final year undergraduate medical students use skills of verbal and non-verbal communication during history-taking and whether these aspects of communication correlate with empathy and gender.MethodsDuring a three steps performance assessment simulating the first day of a resident 30 medical final year students took histories of five simulated patients resulting in 150 videos of physician-patient encounters. These videos were analyzed by external rating with a newly developed observation scale for the verbal and non-verbal communication and with the validated CARE-questionnaire for empathy. One-way ANOVA, t-tests and bivariate correlations were used for statistical analyses.ResultsFemale students showed signicantly higher scores for verbal communication in the case of a female patient with abdominal pain (p < 0.05), while male students started the conversations significantly more often with an open question (p < 0.05) and interrupted the patients significantly later in two cases than female students (p < 0.05). The number of W-questions asked by all students was significantly higher in the case of the female patient with abdominal pain (p < 0.05) and this patient was interrupted after the beginning of the interview significantly earlier than the patients in the other four cases (p < 0.001). Female students reached significantly higher scores for non-verbal communication in two cases (p < 0.05) and showed significantly more empathy than male students in the case of the female patient with abdominal pain (p < 0.05). In general, non-verbal communication correlated significantly with verbal communication and with empathy while verbal communication showed no significant correlation with empathy.ConclusionsUndergraduate medical students display differentiated communication behaviour with respect to verbal and non-verbal aspects of communication and empathy in a performance assessment and special differences could be detected between male and female students. These results suggest that explicit communication training and feedback might be necessary to raise students’ awareness for the different aspects of communication and their interaction.

In the description of the single-slab LTE model in the Appendix of the published article, the value of the line width (Δv) was incorrectly said to be fixed to 1 km s −1 . The actual value that we used in our model for Δv is 2 km s −1 .

Nanofibrous multifunctional materials have attracted a lot of attention because of the benefits of their special structure. Despite the diverse benefits of nanofibrous materials, their inherent stickiness to any surface is a major obstacle in producing and processing such materials. There are many paragons in which biological models or elements from nature have been biomimetically adapted in various areas in order to resolve technical problems, such as the silent flight of the owl, the lotus effect, or the sticky feet of the gecko. One special example shows us how nanofibers might be handled in the future: cribellate spiders possess a specialized comb, the calamistrum, on their hindmost legs, which is used to process and assemble nanofibers into structurally complex capture threads. Within this study, we were able to prove that these fibers do not stick to the calamistrum because of a special fingerprint-like nanostructure on the comb. This structure prevents the nanofibers from smoothly adapting to the surface of the comb, thus minimizing contact and reducing the adhesive van der Waals forces between the nanofibers and surface. This leads to the spiders’ ability of nonsticky processing of nanofibers for their capture threads. The successful transfer of these structures to a technical surface proved that this biological model can be adapted to optimize future tools in technical areas in which antiadhesive handling of nanofibrous materials is required.

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