Introduction:

The progress in medicine is not consistent with prevailing stigmas of dehumanization in the medical practice and in the doctor-patient relationship, which reinforces the need to sustain medical training on the basis of emotional education and the development of competences for managing emotions.

Objective:

To expose the importance of emotional education and the acquisition of emotional competences in medical training.

Methods:

An exploratory systematic review was conducted, using Web of Science and Scopus as sources of information to collect papers published between 2012 and 2022. The search was based on the study of the variable’s emotional education, emotional competences and medical training.

Results:

Four main themes were identified with the content analysis applied in the selected articles: generalities of emotional education; relationship between learning and emotional education, based on the need to enhance self-esteem in students; the importance of emotional education in the training of physicians; and strategies to favor emotional education in the training process of medical students.

Conclusions:

Emotional education was concluded to become an educational innovation of great importance, responding to contemporary social needs, as well as it seeks to achieve a balance between the cognitive and the management of emotions.