Effect of Demographics on EQ in Military Medical Students

Introduction/Purpose:

Objective: The purpose of this study was to assess the differences in emotional quotient during a high stress military trauma simulation of RVU military students by measuring different demographics including race, marital status, and sex in the medical students.

Methods or Case Description:

Methods: The study consisted of 103 students (78 male, 25 female; 85 Caucasian, 11 Asian, 6 Mixed; 66 single, 37 married) attending RVU from three sessions (2017, N=30; 2018, N=32; 2019, N=41). All participants were contracted with the U.S. military, and placed in a hyper-realistic mass-trauma simulation to induce stress. • Participants filled out EQ questionnaires before and after the training using the Veracity TouchScreener® tablet, which records significant psychophysiological responses. • All the responses were pooled across 2017, 2018, and 2019. Contingency tables were analyzed for marital status, gender and race using a CochranMantel-Haenszel test for Nonzero Correlation.

Outcomes: RESULT: Emotional quotient (EQ) data for race, gender, and marital status was not found to be significantly different among the demographics tested across the years.

Conclusion:

Conclusion: Medical students have similar emotional quotients during high stress regardless of marital status, gender and race.  In other words, medical students have a consistent response that is unlikely to conflict with their performance. Although our study cannot disprove the existence of EQ results during stress, it does suggest a small correlation. In future studies we would like to compare emotional quotient data across different professions such as physician assistants, nurses, first responders and social workers.