Psychopedagogical profiles in anatomy education: a comparative cohort study of anxiety, academic procrastination, and performance between first-year medical and dental students

Aims: This study aimed to evaluate how medical and dental curricular formats relate to student performance, and to clarify the role of academic procrastination and anxiety in these differences. Specifically, state and trait anxiety dimensions were evaluated separately alongside course attitudes to examine their associations with academic procrastination and achievement across distinct preclinical curriculum structures. Methods: Participants comprised first-term students enrolled in medicine (n=63) and dentistry (n=65) (n=128 enrolled from 145 eligible students; response rate 88.3%). Attitude Scale Towards the Anatomy Course (ASTAC), Aitken Procrastination Scale (APS), State-Trait Anxiety Inventory-Trait (STAI-T)/State-Trait Anxiety Inventory-State (STAI-S), and Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) were utilized alongside anatomy grades. Bivariate comparisons used pairwise deletion, while multivariable linear regression models applied listwise deletion (n=126). Multiple testing was controlled using the Benjamini–Hochberg False Discovery Rate (FDR, q<.05). Results: Dental students achieved significantly higher anatomy grades than medical peers (p<.001). Conversely, medical students exhibited higher state (p=.040) and trait anxiety (p=.032), which lost statistical significance following FDR adjustment (q=.079). A distinct "gender paradox" emerged: female students reported higher BAI (p=.001), STAI-State (p=.004, q=.008), and trait anxiety (p<.001) than males, yet maintained identical academic performance (p=.438). In the medical cohort, anatomy grades correlated positively with STAI-State (r=.279, q=.045) and STAI-Trait (r=.333, q=.019), and positively with BAI (r=.353, q=.015), whereas no psychometric measures correlated with grades in the dental cohort (all q≥.405). State anxiety correlated positively with academic procrastination in dental students (r=.413, q=.001), but this relationship lost significance after FDR control in medical students (r=.233, q=.093). The final OLS regression model demonstrated that variance explanation increased substantially significantly (p<.001) after adding the branch variable, which stood as the strongest grade predictor (p<0.001). Conclusion: Pre-clinical anatomy performance is associated more strongly with program-specific curricular structures than with baseline individual learner psychological profiles. Non-significant associations in dental students represent an absence of linear correlation within the available sample size rather than empirical evidence of a protective curriculum.