Clonninger's temperament and character inventory profiles of anatomists: is there a relation with specialty choice?

Career psychologists have argued that the career choice and personality interfere with each other. There have been lots of investigations aimed at seeking the relationships between career interests and personality characteristics. There is limited knowledge on personality profiles of the anatomists and on how they are related with their specialty choices.

In this research we aimed to explore the relationship between personality and career interests of anatomists.

Out of 279 anatomists who had been asked to complete the survey via e-mail including three questionnaires, 79 (53 male, 26 female) responded in the present study. Personality was assessed using the Cloninger's Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI). The career interest was determined by Holland's Theme Codes.

The order of high frequency Holland's Codes was as follows: social (44.3%), realistic (35.4%), investigative (27.8%), conventional (19.0%), artistic (7.6%), and enterprising (5.1%). With regard to temperament components of TCI was as follows: novelty seeking (mean=17.7±4.7), harm avoidance (mean=13.9±6.1), reward dependence (mean=13.2±3.4), and persistence (mean=5.4±2.1). Character profiles are as follows: self-directedness (mean=33.1±6.3), self-transcendence (mean=17.9±7.6), and cooperativeness (mean=30.6±5.9). According to the last questionnaire, the most important cause for choosing anatomy is the interest in anatomy since medical study time.

These results in part support Holland's theory, which takes the career as a function of personality and the personality profiles of anatomists have affected the motivation to select their specialty choice partially (Tab. 3, Fig. 1, Ref. 10).