Attitudes Toward Professionalism in Psychology Students at Tecnológico de Monterrey

Professionalism refers to the values, commitment, and responsibility necessary for patient-health professional practice. In each of these, it is developed mainly by direct practice with patients in a controlled environment through vicarious learning, therefore, it is a fundamental piece of student development. Professionalism has been investigated mainly in medical students, so it is necessary to know how it is seen in other health areas with clinical activity such as psychology. For these reasons, this research study objective is to evaluate the attitude towards professionalism of clinical and health psychology students at Tecnológico de Monterrey. The sample was composed of N = 91 undergraduate students of clinical and health psychology, in three different groups: fourth-semester students (G1, n = 45), sixth-semester students who already had direct experience with patients (G2, n = 33), and eighth-semester students who were immersed in clinics and hospitals with continuous practice (G3, n = 13). The instrument used was the Penn State College of Medicine Scale to assess professionalism (PSCMS), which measures six factors (accountability, altruism, duty, excellence, honor and integrity, and respect.). The method used was cross-sectional descriptive. The results indicated that G1 has lower attitudes towards professionalism compared to G3, G2 presents an increase in the perception of the importance of professionalism compared to G1, and, in general, G3 has higher positive attitudes towards professionalism. These results lead to the identification of supervised practice in early semesters of the psychology degree as a key point in professional development, thus concluding a positive relationship between direct practice with patients in supervised settings and the development of professionalism.