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https://doi.org/10.62836/jissh.v3i3.0017
Zhang, A., & Chen, S. (2026). From Traits to Training: Personality-Informed Education for Health Professions Students. Journal of Integrated Social Sciences and Humanities, 3(3), 0017. https://doi.org/10.62836/jissh.v3i3.0017
Volume 3, Issue 3, 2026

From Traits to Training: Personality-Informed Education for Health Professions Students

Health professions education is asked to do several things at once: lay down biomedical knowledge, train clinical skill, and grow communication, teamwork, professionalism, and a capacity for working when the answers are not yet clear. And yet students who sit through the very same curriculum come out looking remarkably different—in how they organise their studying, how they take feedback, how they deal with patients and colleagues, and how they hold up under pressure. Personality traits offer one lens for making sense of that spread, even if their bearing on education is often overstated. This narrative review pulls together the evidence on personality and the main outcomes of students in medicine, nursing, dentistry, pharmacy, rehabilitation, and the other health professions. The sharpest signal in the literature is that conscientiousness follows academic achievement, largely through planning, persistence, the regulation of effort, and simply seeing tasks through to the end. Ties to clinical competence are looser, turning more on the format of the assessment, the stage of training, and the environment in which learning happens. Agreeableness and openness bear on particular corners of empathy and interprofessional learning, whereas neuroticism is the trait most dependably linked to vulnerability under stress, personal distress, and burnout. When it comes to specialty choice, the findings are too tangled to justify prediction at the level of any single individual. Personality assessment can hold modest formative value where it nudges students to reflect on things they are actually in a position to change—self-regulation, communication, engagement with feedback, coping, and reaching out for help—but it has no place standing alone as grounds for admission, ranking, progression, remediation, or the assignment of a career. Handled with care, personality-informed education holds every student to the same competency standards while varying the paths, and the support, that carry them there.

personality traits Big Five health professions education academic performance clinical competence student well-being

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Supporting Agencies

  1. Funding: This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (82404175) and the Funds of Science & Technology Department of Sichuan Province (2025ZNSFSC1629).