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How to Receive Criticism: Theory and Practice from Cognitive and Cultural Approaches

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Abstract

Mistakes in clinical practice may have life-or-death consequences for patients. Training in how to give and receive feedback has been emphasized in medical education for decades, yet medical practitioners continue to struggle with these practices. Giving feedback is difficult because it is not easy for a receiver to receive feedback. Current training programs lack an in-depth understanding of the causes of why receiving feedback is not easy. The purposes of this article are to (1) fill this gap by identifying the shared weaknesses in human nature as the causes underlying the difficulty in receiving feedback, especially criticism, using a cognitive approach; (2) develop logical principles to treat the identified causes; (3) show the shared common wisdom of how to receive criticism through a multicultural approach; and finally, (4) address how these cognitive and multicultural approaches may facilitate receiving criticism in the field of medical education.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Dr. Ashraf Hassaballa and Imam Aly Lela for explaining and verifying the authenticity of the Islamic teachings presented here, as well as Stephanie Swanberg and Karen Smith for reviewing the manuscript and providing feedback. We would also like to thank Drs. Aidi Yin and James Grogan for their helpful comments that expanded the authors’ limited cultural approach to include the multicultural perspective of the final version. Finally, special appreciation goes to Dr. Cynthia Ledford for providing us the clinical cases that enabled our revision of the article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine, O’Dowd Hall, Room 416, 586 Pioneer Drive, Rochester, MI, 48309, USA

    Serena Y. Kuang

  2. Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine, O’Dowd Hall, Room 414, 586 Pioneer Drive, Rochester, MI, 48309, USA

    Suzan Kamel-ElSayed

  3. Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine, O’Dowd Hall, Room 318, 586 Pioneer Drive, Rochester, MI, 48309, USA

    Deirdre Pitts

Authors
  1. Serena Y. Kuang
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  2. Suzan Kamel-ElSayed
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  3. Deirdre Pitts
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Correspondence to Serena Y. Kuang.

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Kuang, S.Y., Kamel-ElSayed, S. & Pitts, D. How to Receive Criticism: Theory and Practice from Cognitive and Cultural Approaches. Med.Sci.Educ. 29, 1109–1115 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40670-019-00808-z

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