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Background: An excessive level of stress and anxiety in medical education can have a negative impact on learning. In particular, the interaction between attending surgeons and trainees in the operating room could induce stress on trainees that is counterproductive, especially if the teaching style or feedback is unduly harsh or critical. Aim: To characterize the effects of stress resulting from attending–trainee interaction during surgical skill acquisition. Methods: Forty medical students learned to perform the FLS pattern-cutting task for the first time in one of four scenarios. In the control condition, no mentor was present. In the three experimental conditions, participants were observed, encouraged, or criticized by an expert surgeon. Results: Task performance, as well as physiological and subjective indicators of stress, were measured. Taking both speed and accuracy into account, participants who were criticized performed the worst on the task, and those who were encouraged performed best. Physiological and subjective measures indicated that the criticized participants experienced the highest level of stress and anxiety. Conclusion: Even though providing constructive criticism to trainees is inevitable during the course of teaching, an exceedingly critical and negative mentoring style by attending physicians could be detrimental to trainees’ acquisition of surgical skills. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Objective: To understand the interaction between haptic and verbal communication, we quantified the relative effect of verbal, haptic, and haptic-plus-verbal feedback in a collaborative virtual pointing task.Background: Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) provide a medium for interaction among remote participants. Better understanding of the role of haptic feedback as a supplement to verbalization can improve the design of CVEs.Methods: Thirty-six participants were randomly paired into 18 dyads to complete a 2-D pointing task in a CVE. In a mixed experimental design, participants completed the task in three communication conditions: haptic only (H), verbal only (V), and haptic plus verbal (HV). The order of the conditions presented to the participants was counterbalanced.Results: The time to task completion, path length, overshoot, and root mean square error were analyzed. Overall, performance in the V and HV conditions was significantly better than in the H condition. H was the least efficient communication channel but elicited response with the shortest reaction time. When verbalization was not available, the use of the haptic device was more likely to be exaggerated to ensure information transmission. When verbalization was used, participants converged on the use of a Cartesian coordinate system for communicating spatial information.Conclusion: Haptic communication can be used to complete a collaborative virtual task but is less efficient than verbal communication. A training period may help to improve the efficiency of haptic communication.Application: These results can be used to design remote collaboration tasks incorporating haptic components and for improving the design of CVEs that support haptic communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]