Physician Gender Affects How Physician Nonverbal Behavior Is Related to Patient Satisfaction

Physician and patient gender both influence medical communication. Nonverbal behavior is generally under-researched in the medical encounter but plays an important role for patient outcomes such as satisfaction. This article aims at identifying how specific physician nonverbal behaviors predict analogue patient satisfaction depending on physician and patient gender. Eleven physicians in a real medical encounter were videotaped and analogue patients indicated their satisfaction with each physician while viewing the videotapes. One hundred sixty-three university students participated (analogue patients). From the videotapes, 17 physician nonverbal behaviors (related to face, body, voice/speech), 2 physician appearance cues, 2 characteristics of the examination room, and 1 patient behavior were coded. For each analogue patient, the correlation between each of these coded characteristics and the patient's satisfaction was calculated, across all physicians and across male and female physicians separately..