ObjectiveThis study aimed at examining the impact of different types of physicians' communication styles on people's subsequent evaluation of physician attributes as well as on their information processing, attitude and decision making.MethodIn a between‐group experiment, 80 participants watched one of three videos in which a gynaecologist displayed a particular communication style in a consultation situation on contraception with an intrauterine device. We compared doctor‐centred communication (DCC) vs patient‐centred communication (PCC) vs patient‐centred communication with need‐orientation (PCC‐N).ResultsIn the PCC condition, participants perceived the physician to be more empathetic and more competent than in the DCC condition. In the DCC condition, participants showed less attitude change compared to the other conditions. In the PCC‐N condition, the physician was perceived as more empathetic and more socially competent than in the other conditions. However, participants acquired less knowledge in the PCC‐N condition.ConclusionWe conclude that appropriate application of particular communication styles depends on specific consultation goals. Our results suggest that patients' needs should be addressed if the main goal is to build a good relationship, whereas a traditional PCC style appears to be more effective in communicating factual information.

In recent research, a systematic association of musical pitch with space has been described in the socalled Spatial-Pitch-Association-of-Response Codes-effect (SPARC). Typically, high pitch is associated with upper/ right and low pitch with lower/left space. However, a theoretical classification of these associations regarding their experiential sources is difficult. Therefore, we applied a theoretical framework of numerical cognition classifying similar Space-Associated Response Codes (SARC) effects according to their groundedness, embodiedness and situatedness. We tested these attributes with a group of nonmusicians and with a group of highly skilled cello players playing high tones with lower hand positions (i.e., reverse SPARC alignment) in a standard SPARC context of a piano and a reversed SPARC context of a cello. The results showed that SPARC is grounded, in general. However, for cello player SPARC is also situated and embodied. We conclude that groundedness, embodiedness and situatedness provide general characteristics of mapping cognitive representations to space.

BackgroundPatients and advice seekers come to a medical consultation with typical needs, and physicians require adequate communication skills in order to address those needs effectively. It is largely unclear, however, to what extent advice seekers’ attitudes toward a medical procedure or their resulting decisions are influenced by a physician’s communication that ignores or explicitly takes these needs into account.ObjectiveThis experimental study tested how advice seekers’ salient needs and doctor’s communication styles influenced advice seekers’ attitudes toward mammography screening and their decision whether or not to participate in this procedure.MethodsOne hundred women (age range 20-47 years, mean 25.22, SD 4.71) participated in an interactive role play of an online consultation. During the consultation, a fictitious, program-controlled physician provided information about advantages and disadvantages of mammography screening. The physician either merely communicated factual medical information or made additional comments using a communication style oriented toward advice seekers’ typical needs for clarity and well-being. Orthogonal to this experimental treatment, participants’ personal needs for clarity and for well-being were either made salient before or after the consultation with a needs questionnaire. We also measured all participants’ attitudes toward mammography screening and their hypothetical decisions whether or not to participate before and after the experiment.ResultsAs assumed, the participants expressed strong needs for clarity (mean 4.57, SD 0.42) and for well-being (mean 4.21, SD 0.54) on 5-point Likert scales. Making these needs salient or not revealed significant interaction effects with the physician’s communication style regarding participants’ attitude change (F 1,92=7.23, P=.009, η2=.073) and decision making (F 1,92=4.43, P=.038, η2=.046). Those participants whose needs were made salient before the consultation responded to the physician’s communication style, while participants without salient needs did not. When the physician used a need-oriented communication style, those participants with salient needs had a more positive attitude toward mammography after the consultation than before (mean 0.13, SD 0.54), while they changed their attitude in a negative direction when confronted with a purely fact-oriented communication style (mean −0.35, SD 0.80). The same applied to decision modification (need-oriented: mean 0.10, SD 0.99; fact-oriented: mean −0.30, SD 0.88).ConclusionsThe findings underline the importance of communicating in a need-oriented style with patients and advice seekers who are aware of their personal needs. Ignoring the needs of those people appears to be particularly problematic. So physicians’ sensitivity for advice seekers’ currently relevant needs is essential.