A study investigated the relationships among the social perception processes, person-centered communicative strategies, and the mediating factors of empathy and context-relevant beliefs of physicians. Subjects, 46 first-year medical students, were first interviewed on a series of structured tasks that assessed their constructs for perceiving people and the "person-centeredness" of their communication in situations frequently faced by physicians. After the interviews, the subjects completed a mail questionnaire designed to assess their attitudes about the medical interview and their levels of empathic motivation. In the final phase of the study, each subject interviewed a recently admitted patient at a university hospital to isolate the patient's present condition and to find out information about his or her medical history, the medical history of the patient's family, current treatment, and life style. These results showed that person-centered communication was consistently related to medical students' ability to construe the dispositional and motivational characteristics of their patients. It appeared that when the physician's goal was to regulate, advise, or solicit information from a patient, those with more sophisticated interpersonal construct systems were more likely to conceive the patient's perspective and to use it in formulating patient-centered communication strategies. (FL)