Work Stressors,Social Support,and Burnout in Junior Doctors: Exploring Direct and Indirect Pathways

The study tested a pathway model linking different occupational stressors, different sources of social support, and burnout. A sample of 184 junior medical doctors was used. Pathway analysis suggested that doctors who experienced increased time demands, organizational constraints, and a lack of personal confidence perceived their consultants as less supportive, whereas those who experienced greater clinical responsibility perceived their supervisors as more supportive. A lack of support from coworkers was linked with a lack of support from consultants, top management, and family. The perception of consultant support was linked with lower burnout, whereas the perception of coworker support was linked with higher burnout. The present findings may inform interventions aimed to support junior doctors experiencing burnout.     

Assessing the Relationship Between Youth Sport Participation Settings and Creativity in Adulthood

This article presents an assessment of the relative influences of time spent participating in organized sports and informal sports during childhood with respect to the development of general creativity. In this study, 99 upper-division undergraduate and graduate students completed a comprehensive childhood leisure activities questionnaire and the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults. According to the results of the joint generalized least-squares regression analysis, hours spent in organized sport settings was negatively related to creativity as an adult; time spent in unstructured sport settings was found to be positively related to adult creativity. The findings also point to the importance of balancing participation across organized and unstructured settings. The most creative individuals in the sample were those who spent roughly half of their sport participation time in each setting, as opposed to individuals with below-average creativity, who spent upwards of 3/4 of their sport participation time in organized settings. Therefore, fostering creative development through sport may not require a dramatic reorientation from current youth sport development models, but only a shift toward a more balanced distribution of time spent playing in both organized and unstructured settings. Future experiments are needed to test this relationship.     

The relationship between beliefs about emotions and quality of life in irritable bowel syndrome

Suppression of undesirable emotions, as well as beliefs about the unacceptability of experiencing and expressing emotions, have both been shown to be related to poorer health-related outcomes in several clinical groups. Potential models through which these variables relate have yet to be tested in those with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and are therefore examined in the current article. Online questionnaires were administered to people with IBS (n = 84) to test a mediation model in which beliefs about the unacceptability of emotions are associated with greater emotional suppression, which in turn relates to increased affective distress and consequently poorer quality of life. An alternate model to test the direction of effect along with two further models using support-seeking as mediators of the same predictor and outcome were also tested. Emotional suppression and affective distress (in that particular order) mediate the relationship between beliefs about emotions and quality of life IBS. The models using support-seeking as mediators of the relationship between beliefs about emotions and the two outcomes were not supported. These findings suggest a role for emotional processing in medically unexplained symptoms and imply the need to address such beliefs about emotions in psychological therapies.     

Intentional self-regulation, ecological assets, and thriving in adolescence: a developmental systems model

The positive youth development (PYD) perspective emphasizes that thriving occurs when individual ?context relations involve the alignment of adolescent strengths with the resources in their contexts. The authors propose that a key component of this relational process is the strength that youth possess in the form of self-regulatory processes; these processes optimize opportunities to obtain ecological resources that enhance the probability of PYD. They use the selection, optimization, and compensation (SOC) model of intentional self-regulation to discuss the role of self-regulation in the PYD perspective among diverse youth.     

Teaching adults new words: the role of practice and consolidation

Semantic and orthographic learning of new words was investigated with the help of the picture-word interference (PWI) task. In this version of the Stroop task, picture naming is delayed by the simultaneous presentation of a semantically related as opposed to an unrelated distractor word (a specific PWI effect), as well as by an unrelated word compared with a nonword (a general PWI effect). This interference is taken to reflect automatic orthographic and semantic processing. The authors observed that participants showed both types of PWI effects for newly learned words following a single study session. Interestingly, specific PWI effects were not obtained immediately after testing but did emerge a week later without additional practice. This suggests that a period of consolidation is involved in the establishment of word representations. In addition, identical PWI effects were obtained when the study and test words were presented in either the same or different letter case. This provides evidence that the newly acquired orthographic representations are coded in an abstract format.     

Preserved Implicit Knowledge of a Forgotten Childhood Language

ABSTRACT— Previous research suggests that a language learned during early childhood is completely forgotten when contact to that language is severed. In contrast with these findings, we report leftover traces of early language exposure in individuals in their adult years, despite a complete absence of explicit memory for the language. Specifically, native English individuals under age 40 selectively relearned subtle Hindi or Zulu sound contrasts that they once knew. However, individuals over 40 failed to show any relearning, and young control participants with no previous exposure to Hindi or Zulu showed no learning. This research highlights the lasting impact of early language experience in shaping speech perception, and the value of exposing children to foreign languages even if such exposure does not continue into adulthood.     

Differences in startle reactivity during the perception of angry and fearful faces

Emotion researchers often categorize angry and fearful face stimuli as "negative" or "threatening". Perception of fear and anger, however, appears to be mediated by dissociable neural circuitries and often elicit distinguishable behavioral responses. The authors sought to elucidate whether viewing anger and fear expressions produce dissociable psychophysiological responses (i.e., the startle reflex). The results of two experiments using different facial stimulus sets (representing anger, fear, neutral, and happy) indicated that viewing anger was associated with a significantly heightened startle response (p < .05) relative to viewing fear, happy, and neutral. This finding suggests that while anger and fear faces convey messages of "threat", their priming effect on startle circuitry differs. Thus, angry expressions, representing viewer-directed threat with an unambiguous source (i.e., the expresser), may more effectively induce a motivational propensity to withdraw or escape. The source of threat is comparatively less clear for fearful faces. The differential effects of these two facial threat signals on the defensive motivational system adds to growing literature highlighting the importance of distinguishing between emotional stimuli of similar valence, along lines of meaning and functional impact.