A Gender-role Perspective of Coping and Burnout

Cette étude explore la relation entre la dépression, le stress professionnel et les réactions positives chez du personnel scolaire des deux sexes. Les résultats indiquent que les hommes présentent un score significativement plus élevé que celui des femmes à l'échelle de dépersonnalisation du "Mas-lach Burnout Inventory". Alors que les hommes sont plus que les femmes victimes de stress au travail et cela de façon significative, ils ont aussi une plus faible probabilité de faire appel à des techniques de compensation en particulier dans la qualité de Ieur vie quotidienne (les investissements dans les relations amicales et les activités culturelles). D'autres données suggèrent que les femmes sont plus que les hommes capables d'utiliser des stratégies susceptibles de contrecarrer l'effondrement. Chez les hommes, la dépression reléve à la fois du stress professionnel et des enfants: la présence d'enfants élève significativement le niveau de dépression d'un homme.
This study examines the relationship between burnout, work stress, and coping in female and male school personnel. Results indicated that men, compared to women, scored significantly higher on depersonalisation, one of the subscales of the Maslach Burnout Inventory. Men were experiencing significantly greater work stress than women, but were less likely than their female counterparts to employ coping techniques, particularly with regard to their quality of daily life, investment in friends, and cultural activities. Further results suggested that women were better able to use coping strategies to reduce burnout than men. In men, burnout appeared to be a joint function of work stress and children, with the presence of children significantly raising a man's level of burnout.     

Transparency: relation to depth, subjective contours, luminance, and neon color spreading

The perception of transparency is highly dependent on luminance and perceived depth. An image region is seen as transparent if it is of intermediate luminance relative to adjacent image regions, and if it is perceived in front of another region and has a boundary which provides information that an object is visible through this region. Yet, transparency is not just the passive end-product of these required conditions. If perceived transparency is triggered, a number of seemingly more elemental perceptual primitives such as color, contour, and depth can be radically altered. Thus, with the perception of transparency, neon color spreading becomes apparent, depth changes, stereoscopic depth capture can be eliminated, and otherwise robust subjective contours can be abolished. In addition, we show that transparency is not coupled strongly to real-world chromatic constraints since combinations of luminance and color which would be unlikely to arise in real-world scenes still give rise to the perception of transparency. Rather than seeing transparency as a perceptual end-point, determined by seemingly more primitive processes, we interpret perceived transparency as much a 'cause', as an 'effect'. We speculate that the anatomical substrate for such mutual interaction may lie in cortical feed-forward connections which maintain modular segregation and cortical feedback connections which do not.     

Linear Analogue Self-Assessment and Procrustean Measurement: A Critical Review of Visual Analogue Scaling in Pain Assessment

Visual analogue scales (VASs) are one of the most widely used self-report measures of clinical pain. This article reviews the empirical literature on linear analogue self-assessment (LASA) and critically examines the features that appear to have made it such an attractive measurement option in pain assessment. It is concluded that analogue scaling does not withstand critical scrutiny as a primary measure of either pain intensity or pain affect and that, in most circumstances, the overall clinical utility of VASs is inferior to that of more structured pain indices.     

Toward an understanding of psychological burnout among police officers

This study examined a research model developed to understand psychological burnout among police officers. Data were collected from 828 men and women in police work using questionnaires completed anonymously. Five groups of predictor variables identified in previous research were considered: individual demographic and situational variables, work stressors, stressful events, work-family conflict and coping responses. Sources of stress (chronic stressors, stressful events, work-family conflict) were significantly related to levels of psychological burnout when individual demographic and situational variables were controlled.     

An object-oriented simulation of a brain system underlying human aggression

Neural structures involved in aggression were incorporated into a model on the basis of neuro-anatomical data. A software program written in Smalltalk, the Brain Structure Simulator (Seguin, 1994) was used to simulate the effects of activity levels of different brain structures. Relationships among brain structures were then tested by changing activity levels of key structures. Results were consistent with research reports on the brain basis of aggression (Albert, Walsh, & Jonik, 1993; Pontius, 1984).     

Reducing MMPI-2 defensiveness: the effect of specialized instructions on retest validity in a job applicant sample

The MMPI-2 is often used for screening job applicants when public safety or security are at risk. Inherent in such applications is concern for profile validity and test defensiveness. In this study, we examine the impact of revised instructions on profile validity for a group of job applicants who initially produced invalid profiles. Participants were 271 male applicants for airline pilot positions. Of these, 72 produced invalid defensive MMPI-2 profiles during preemployment screening. The MMPI-2 was readministered to these applicants with instructions informing them of validity scales and instructing them to respond in a more open, honest manner. Comparisons were made between valid and invalid profiles for initial administrations and between valid and invalid profiles at readministration. Some clinical scales were more elevated for valid, nondefensive profiles. Most content scales showed more elevation for valid profiles, and 12% of the applicants who were retested produced significant elevations (T>or=65) on the content scales. Profiles were similar to those produced by employed pilots of a previous study.     

The dimensionality of the flanker compatibility effect: A psychophysiological analysis

The psychophysiological approach was used to evaluate the effects of feature similarity and intrinsic response mapping on the flanker compatibility effect. Symbol (e.g., < > < and < / <) and letter arrays (e.g., HCH and SCS) were used. Results showed that delays in stimulus evaluation and both peripheral and central response competition contributed to the compatibility effect, with the contribution of these processes depending on feature similarity and the intrinsic response mapping of the stimuli. For letter stimuli, the difference in the size of the compatibility effect for similar and dissimilar arrays could be accounted for in terms of stimulus evaluation. For symbol arrays, differences in size of the compatibility effect could be accounted for by response competition. Thus, symbol and letter arrays do not appear to be processed differently; what is different is the degree to which stimulus and response-related processes are affected by incompatibility.