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

The research team, led by Colleen P. Nofi, Ila Sethi, and Vihas Patel of Northwell Health and the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, together with collaborators at Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center and Hackensack University Medical Center, designed an exploratory prospective observational cohort study spanning the 2022–2023 academic year. Their central question was deceptively simple: does a resident’s emotional intelligence, commonly abbreviated EI, predict the degree of agreement between how residents rate themselves and how their programs’ Clinical Competency Committees, the faculty panels formally charged with assessing trainee progress, rate them?

To measure emotional intelligence, the investigators used the 33-item Schutte Self-Report Emotional Intelligence Test, a validated instrument rooted in the Salovey and Mayer model of EI as the ability to monitor, discriminate among, and use emotional information. Self-assessment alignment was quantified using the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education’s Milestones 2.0 framework, a competency-based evaluation system that grades residents across specialty-specific subcompetencies. Concordance between resident self-evaluations and Clinical Competency Committee evaluations was captured at two time points, mid-year and end-of-year, allowing the team to track not just whether residents were accurate, but whether their insight improved as the training year unfolded.

The dataset included performance evaluation data from 88 surgical residents whose concordance could be analyzed; of those, 36 also completed the emotional intelligence survey. The headline result was a trend rather than a definitive statistical verdict: residents with medium to high EI scores demonstrated greater concordance with their Clinical Competency Committee evaluations than residents with low EI scores, with a p-value of 0.059, just shy of the conventional threshold for statistical significance. In an exploratory study of this size, the researchers argue, such a near-significant association is meaningful evidence that self-awareness, a core component of emotional intelligence, underpins honest and accurate self-appraisal of surgical competence.

The temporal data added a second, arguably more hopeful, layer to the story. At mid-year, 43 percent of residents showed low concordance between self-assessment and faculty evaluation, while 57 percent showed high concordance. By the end of the academic year, low concordance had fallen to 38 percent and high concordance had climbed to 62 percent. In other words, residents as a group became more accurate judges of their own performance over time, a pattern the authors attribute plausibly to the accumulating effect of ongoing feedback, formal evaluations, and the reflective practice embedded in surgical training.

Perhaps the most unexpected finding concerned program size, a variable rarely scrutinized in competency research. Residents in medium-sized programs achieved strikingly higher concordance, at 86 percent, than those in small programs, at 58 percent, or large programs, at 52 percent, a difference that reached statistical significance with a p-value of 0.029. The authors offer no single explanation, but the pattern invites speculation about the social dynamics of feedback: in mid-sized programs, faculty may know each resident well enough to give calibrated, individualized evaluations, while the smallest programs may suffer from limited evaluator diversity and the largest from anonymity, with residents and faculty interacting too briefly for honest, granular assessment. Notably, neither postgraduate year level nor program type showed any significant association with concordance.

The significance of accurate self-assessment extends well beyond academic bookkeeping. Prior work has repeatedly documented that residents frequently overestimate their abilities relative to faculty judgment, and the milestone framework under which these evaluations occur directly shapes promotion, remediation, and ultimately board certification. A resident who cannot accurately perceive a competency gap may fail to seek the operative experience or study needed to close it, while a program that cannot rely on self-assessment must invest heavily in external surveillance. The new study suggests that emotional intelligence could serve as a screening variable, identifying trainees who need structured support in developing the self-awareness that honest self-evaluation demands.

The findings also sit within a growing body of literature linking emotional intelligence to surgical outcomes. Earlier studies have associated EI with resident well-being, lower burnout, higher job satisfaction, and even technical performance measures such as surgical quality. A 2020 pilot study by Nayar and colleagues reported that emotional intelligence predicted accurate self-assessment of surgical quality, and the present work extends that logic from the individual procedure to the full spectrum of clinical competencies codified by the ACGME. Educational researchers have begun designing interventions, from patient-centered experiences to formal EI coaching curricula, aimed at cultivating these skills deliberately rather than assuming they emerge from clinical exposure alone.

The authors are careful to frame their conclusions within the study’s limits. With only 36 residents completing the EI survey, the cohort was small and the near-significant p-value could shift in either direction with more data; the self-report nature of the Schutte test introduces the possibility that residents with genuinely high self-awareness also rate their EI differently; and the multi-institutional design, while a strength for generalizability, leaves residual confounding from institutional culture and evaluation practices unmeasured. Data privacy constraints prevent open sharing of the underlying dataset. Still, the study’s exploratory design was explicitly intended to generate hypotheses, and its results justify larger, powered trials of EI measurement and training in surgical education.

If confirmed, the implications for training programs are concrete. Programs might incorporate validated EI assessments at entry, use concordance between self- and faculty evaluations as a flag for residents lacking insight, and design feedback structures, particularly in small and large programs, that replicate the calibrated, personal evaluation environment apparently achieved in mid-sized ones. The steady improvement in self-assessment accuracy across the academic year reinforces a message educators have long promoted but rarely quantified: feedback, delivered consistently and received with genuine self-awareness, teaches residents not just how to operate, but how to see themselves as surgeons. In a profession where the cost of misjudging one’s own limits is measured in patient outcomes, cultivating that inner clarity may be one of the most consequential skills a training program can teach.

Subject of Research: The relationship between emotional intelligence and the accuracy of surgical residents' self-assessed clinical competency

Article Title: Emotional intelligence influences surgical resident’s self-perception of competency: an exploratory, multi-institutional study

Article References: Nofi, C. P., Sethi, I., Demyan, L., Koti, S., Hansen, L., Serfin, J., Surick, B., & Patel, V. (2026). Emotional intelligence influences surgical resident’s self-perception of competency: an exploratory, multi-institutional study. Global Surgical Education – Journal of the Association for Surgical Education, 5(1), Article 166. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44186-026-00568-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44186-026-00568-6

Keywords: emotional intelligence, surgical residents, self-assessment, Clinical Competency Committee, ACGME Milestones 2.0, surgical education, competency evaluation, Schutte Self-Report Emotional Intelligence Test, graduate medical education, feedback, self-awareness, Emotional