Physicians' affective communication can temper patients' anxiety and uncertainty during bad news consultations, and enhance their ability to recall medical information. The reduction of anxiety and uncertainty could not explain patients' enhanced recall, which leaves the underlying mechanism unspecified. Our findings underline the importance of addressing patients' emotions and provide empirical support to incorporate this in clinical guidelines and recommendations.

Although our findings need to be translated to clinical patients, they suggest that clinicians need to deal with patients' emotions before providing additional medical information.

No abstract