This study aimed to assess how the gender of medical students affects their communication styles and those of simulated patients (SPs) during objective structured clinical examination medical interviews in Japan.
1) Medical interviews conducted by 82 fourth-year medical students (53 male and 29 female) at Nagoya University School of Medicine were analyzed by means of the Roter Interaction Analysis System.
2) Compared with male medical students, female medical students engaged in significantly more emotionally focused talk, particularly empathy, and asked more open-ended questions.
3) With female medical students, SPs engaged in significantly more social talk (personal remarks), gave more biomedical information, and made more total utterances than they did with male medical students.
4) The gender of medical students significantly affected their communication styles and those of SPs. (127 words)

Background / Purpose: The aim of this study was to analyze the relationship between metacognition and mental health among first-year Japanese medical students at several months after admission.　Method: A questionnaire survey was conducted on first-year medical students at a private medical university. We used the Adults' Metacognition Scale to measure metacognition and the Japanese version of the 12-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) to measure mental health status.　Results: The data from 80 students were analyzed. The total metacognition score and the subscale monitoring score were negatively correlated with the GHQ-12 total score and were significantly different between the poor mental health group and the good mental health group. 　Discussion: The results suggest that students in poor mental health status were considered to have weak metacognition, especially monitoring.