The Effect of Physician Immediacy on Patient Liking for Physician, Motivation, and Recall

ABSTRACT

Guided by the fostering relationships function of patient-centered communication (PCC), the present study utilized a 2 (high/low nonverbal immediacy) x 2 (high/low verbal immediacy) between-subjects experimental design to determine whether physician verbal and nonverbal immediacy influenced participant liking for physician, motivation to process a health message, and recall of the health message. An actor physician delivered a 3–4 minute video-recorded message, diagnosing U.S. adult participants, serving as analogue patients, with a health issue. The results indicated main effects for physician verbal immediacy and nonverbal immediacy on participant liking for physician and motivation such that participants had greater liking for the physician and motivation to do what the physician requested when the physician demonstrated greater verbal and nonverbal immediacy. However, physician verbal and nonverbal immediacy did not influence participantsʻ recall. Physicians should consider displaying verbal and nonverbal immediacy to create a positive impression among patients, and to motivate patients to take steps to improve their health.

KEYWORDS:

• immediacy
• physician-patient communication
• liking
• motivation
• recall

Acknowledgements

I wish to express my appreciation to Dr. John O. Greene for his guidance and revisions throughout the completion of this research project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Affective learning involves studentsʻ feelings toward learning course content, and cognitive learning involves studentsʻ abilities to understand and remember course content (Bloom, 1956).

2. The stimuli may be requested by contacting the author.

3. Procedures such as use of timers, attention checks, and evaluating open-ended data were used based on procedures recommended by Dennis et al. (2020) to help ensure high quality data from participants, which resulted in the deletion of many responses.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Purdue University Lamb School Doctoral Grant.