Background
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Emotionally difficult situations are unavoidable in medical training. Students and doctors have reported experiencing negative emotions such as sadness when watching a patient’s suffering, fear of making mistakes, or anger when witnessing colleagues’ unprofessional behaviour [How could emotions affect residents’ learning? Research in cognitive psychology has described several mechanisms through which both positive and negative emotions can interfere with cognitive processes involved in learning. For example, positive emotions are known to trigger a “global processing” style that makes it easier to see the “big picture” in a situation and to increase learners’ ability to think flexibly [In the residency training, emotions can interfere with cognitive processes, such as attention and perception, for example, when a resident studies an online material about a patient’s problem. If attention is deviated to other tasks such as processing of emotions, integration of the to-be-learned information into knowledge structures stored in memory will suffer [This evidence points to the importance of assisting residents in dealing with commonly experienced emotions, thereby allowing them to benefit from learning opportunities. Possibly relevant here are strategies that have been investigated by research on Emotion Regulation. A well-known model of Emotion Regulation (ER) [One promising intervention seems to be The present study had a two-folded purpose. We examined (i) whether negative emotions hinder learning of scientific information, and (ii) whether this impact (if any) was counteracted by an intervention based on cognitive reappraisal. Residents watched either a neutral or an emotional videoclip, the latter either followed by cognitive reappraisal or not. Subsequently, all residents studied a relevant medical text and took a recall test. Consistently with the study purpose, the main outcome measurement was test score. To get insight on the residents’ engagement with the learning task, we also measured cognitive engagement and study time. Based on previous research [