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Research across multiple fields has revealed the importance of emotion and other psychological factors in the learning process, but the role of emotions in learning has not been extensively explored for medical learners. In this thesis, we draw on literature from other fields and conduct new studies to explore how emotions and other psychological processes affect learners in the process of becoming independent physicians.

We explore these effects in contexts where emotions are likely to be particularly high for learners, beginning with feedback and then extending into the space where feedback is most crucial, remediation of struggling learners. Through this work, we map the landscapes related to what is already known about these topics, and we offer new studies that examine them. For example, we explore how feedback orientation, a concept developed in management science to describe a learner’s durable attitudes and relationship toward feedback, is a useful concept for medical learners and how it relates to their emotions during feedback. We investigate learners’ emotional experience of going through the remediation process and how that differs for medical students in the U.S. and the Netherlands. We then take what we have learned and apply it to existing frameworks that can help on-the-ground educators support learners. We hope to spotlight ways in which we can leverage emotion to improve feedback and remediation, and also make the larger case that emotion and other psychological factors deserve greater attention in the medical education literature.