Massive New Dataset Tracks Emotional Intelligence in Healthcare Chaplain Trainees

Healthcare chaplains occupy one of the most emotionally demanding roles in modern medicine. They sit with dying patients, comfort grieving families, and support clinical staff through crises, all while navigating the complex spiritual and psychological landscape of hospitals and hospices. Yet for a profession built so fundamentally on emotional skill, the scientific evidence base for how chaplains actually develop those skills has remained surprisingly thin. A newly published data note in Discover Psychology aims to change that, unveiling one of the largest multicenter datasets ever assembled on emotional intelligence and counseling self-efficacy among trainees in Clinical Pastoral Education, the standard training pathway for healthcare chaplains in the United States.

The dataset, compiled by Csaba Szilagyi of Rush University and Johns Hopkins Medicine and Patricia K. Palmer of Emory University’s Woodruff Health Sciences Center, captures survey responses from 274 Clinical Pastoral Education students at baseline, along with pre- and post-training longitudinal data from 196 of those students. The participants were interns and residents enrolled at 29 centers accredited by ACPE, the standard-setting body for pastoral education formerly known as the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education. Data collection took place between 2020 and 2022, a period that spanned the COVID-19 pandemic and placed unprecedented emotional strain on healthcare environments of every kind.

What makes the resource scientifically valuable is its dual focus on two constructs that researchers consider core professional competencies for chaplains. The first is emotional intelligence, the capacity to perceive, understand, manage, and use emotions in oneself and others. The second is counseling self-efficacy, a trainee’s belief in their own ability to carry out the concrete activities of counseling, from building rapport to managing difficult conversations. Both constructs have been studied extensively in nurses, physicians, psychologists, and social workers, but comparable large-scale evidence in chaplaincy has been conspicuously absent, leaving educators without a solid empirical foundation for judging whether their experiential training model actually works.

To measure emotional intelligence, the researchers used the Schutte Self-Report Emotional Intelligence Test, a widely deployed self-report instrument that assesses traits such as emotion perception, emotion regulation, and the utilization of feelings in problem solving. Counseling self-efficacy was measured with the Counselor Activity Self-Efficacy Scales, which break the counseling role into specific task domains and ask respondents to rate their confidence in each. By pairing these two validated instruments across multiple time points, the dataset allows researchers to examine not just snapshots of ability but trajectories of change over the course of training, the kind of longitudinal design that single-site studies of chaplaincy education have rarely achieved.

The longitudinal structure is particularly rich for residents, the more advanced tier of CPE trainees. For this group the dataset includes not only pre-training and post-training assessments but also a mid-residency measurement, creating a three-point trajectory that can reveal whether gains in emotional intelligence and self-efficacy accumulate steadily, plateau, or accelerate at particular stages of supervised clinical practice. Alongside the quantitative scores, the dataset records demographic and educational information for each participant, enabling analyses of how factors such as age, gender, prior education, and religious background relate to baseline competencies and to the amount of growth trainees experience.

Perhaps the most distinctive component is qualitative. The dataset preserves open-ended responses in which students described what they perceived as facilitators and barriers to the development of their emotional intelligence during training. These free-text accounts offer a ground-level view of how experiential education actually operates: which supervisory practices, clinical encounters, and peer group processes trainees credit with sharpening their emotional awareness, and which structural obstacles, from heavy patient loads to limited feedback, they identify as impediments. Combined with the validated scale scores, this mixed structure supports both statistical modeling and thematic analysis within a single coherent resource.

The parent study behind the dataset was designed to answer three questions that have lingered in the pastoral psychology literature: whether emotional intelligence and counseling self-efficacy change from the start to the end of CPE, what the baseline distributions of these capacities look like across a broad, geographically dispersed sample, and how demographic and educational factors shape both. Because the data were gathered across 29 accredited centers rather than a single institution, the sample captures the heterogeneity of real-world CPE programs, which vary in size, setting, patient population, and educational philosophy. That breadth matters enormously for anyone hoping to generalize findings to the profession as a whole, and the authors note that, to date, this stands among the largest multicenter datasets in CPE research.

The potential applications extend well beyond chaplaincy itself. Researchers studying emotional intelligence and self-efficacy development in comparable healthcare professions, including nursing, medicine, social work, and clinical psychology, can use the dataset as a comparison benchmark for other trainee populations. Educational scientists interested in experiential learning more broadly may find in it a rare opportunity to model competency growth in a profession where learning happens primarily through supervised encounter with real patients rather than through classroom instruction. And because the data are being shared openly, the resource lowers the barrier to entry for smaller research teams who lack the infrastructure to mount their own multisite data collection efforts.

The project also offers a case study in responsible research conduct. The study was reviewed by the Johns Hopkins Medicine Institutional Review Board, which determined that formal ethical approval was waived because the research qualified for exemption under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Common Rule, with survey data recorded without identifiable personal information and posing no more than minimal risk. Informed consent was obtained from all participants, and the work was funded by the Foundation for ACPE. The authors acknowledge collaboration with Paul Galchutt, Dr. Kristin Langstraat, and Dr. George Fitchett, along with the ACPE Certified Educators who supported data collection and the students who took part.

For a field that has long relied on small, single-site studies and anecdotal accounts of transformation, the arrival of a large, validated, longitudinal, multicenter dataset marks a genuine inflection point. It gives chaplaincy educators, for the first time, the statistical power to ask whether the experiential model at the heart of their profession demonstrably builds the emotional competencies it promises, and it gives the broader psychological sciences a new window into how human beings learn to do some of the most emotionally demanding work in healthcare. As hospitals increasingly recognize spiritual care as an integral component of patient-centered medicine, evidence about how that care workforce is trained has never mattered more.

Subject of Research: A multicenter longitudinal dataset measuring emotional intelligence and counseling self-efficacy in clinical pastoral education students at U.S. healthcare training centers.

Article Title: Multicenter dataset describing emotional intelligence and counseling self-efficacy among clinical pastoral education students in healthcare settings

Article References: Szilagyi, C., & Palmer, P. K. (2026). Multicenter dataset describing emotional intelligence and counseling self-efficacy among clinical pastoral education students in healthcare settings. Discover Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-026-00905-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44202-026-00905-2

Keywords: emotional intelligence, counseling self-efficacy, clinical pastoral education, healthcare chaplaincy, ACPE, Schutte Self-Report Emotional Intelligence Test, Counselor Activity Self-Efficacy Scales, longitudinal dataset, pastoral psychology, experiential education, trainee competency, open data