Emotional Intelligence Weakly Predicts Academic Success in Medical Programs: A

Multilevel Meta-AnalysisWhich factors predict academic success in undergraduate medical programs? While some students perform well in the Doctor of Medicine (MD) programs, others fail to complete their study or struggle in their MD journey. Moreover, the current competencies and expectations of undergraduate medical students are different from those in the last 20 or 30 years (Vanderbilt, Perkins, Muscaro, Papadimos, & Baugh, 2017), which highlights the significance of revising the admission criteria for such programs (Fielding et al., 2018). It is not surprising that a large amount of research, especially in medical education, has been conducted to examine which admission criteria contribute to the academic success of MD students. In the last two decades, researchers have tried to test the association between a number of factors such as metacognition awareness (Akbarilakeh & Sharifi¬Fard, 2021; Ullah et al., 2020), motivation (Altwijri et al., 2021; Wu et al., 2020; Yun et al., 2021), coping strategies (Mahmood et al., 2021; Banerjee et al., 2019), learning style (Amin et al., 2021; Hernández-Torrano et al., 2017), educational environment (Javaeed et al., 2022), critical thinking (Chang et al., 2021; Shakurnia et al., 2021), and emotional intelligence (EI; Humphrey-Murto et al., 2014; Libbrecht et al., 2014; Singh et al., 2020); the latter is the variable of interest in the current study. Although the notion of EI was first discussed by Edward Thorndike in the 1920s when he conceptualized that intelligence is a multidimensional rather than a unidimensional construct, and includes mechanical, abstract, and social intelligence, it was Salovey and Mayer’s (1990) seminal work that contributed to the systematic and scientific study of EI. Since then, a number of theories and models of EI have been introduced such as Bar-On model (Bar-On, 2006) and Goleman’s model (Goleman, 2006). EI has been extensively researched in different areas of study including sports, education, music, and medicine (Abdulla Alabbasi et al., 2021; Arribas- Galarraga et al., 2020; Austin et al., 2005; Kaschub, 2002). EI is gaining importance in medicine since success in this field is not just determined by knowledge and academic excellence but the acquisition of EI-related skills such as empathy, communication, interpersonal sensitivity, and emotion recognition (Libbrecht et al., 2014). Doctors manage different kinds of patients with varying socioeconomic statuses and different cases that range from mild to critical, which require doctors to understand their patients’ emotions, show empathy and, sometimes, communicate bad news in professional ways. Interest in studying the association between EI and academic success in MD programs began in the first decade of the 21stcentury. Notably, a literature review on the predictors of academic success in medical schools show that EI is one of the most studied variables, with three systematic reviews conducted on this topic (Arora et al., 2010; Cook et al., 2016; Singh et al., 2020). One of the major findings of these systematic reviews was that primary studies reported contradictory findings. For instance, Singh et al. (2020) reported that 8 studies concluded that EI has a positive impact on academic success, 2 studies showed nonsignificant association between EI and academic success, and 11 studies showing that there is a negative relationship between EI and academic success. The same conclusion was reached in the systematic reviews by Arora et al. (2010) and Cook’s et al. (2016). Although systematic reviews offer valuable source information for researchers regarding the effectiveness of an intervention, the difference between two or more groups on a specific variable, and the association between different factors, the method does not provide quantitative and reliable results. Therefore, one of the current study’s objectives is to synthesize the effect stemming from primary studies using a multilevel meta- analysis approach to clarify the nature and magnitude of the relationship between EI and academic success in MD programs. The second objective is to study factors that might contribute to the contradictory findings in the primary studies (see Table 1). The next section sheds light on possible sources of inconsistency in the primary research based on reviewing the literature on the association between EI and academic success. Insert Table 1 around here