Abusive interactions and burnout: Examining occupation,gender, and the mediating role of community

Abstract

Two studies examined the association of gender and occupational group (nursing versus non-nursing) with perceived risk of abuse (sexual harassment and verbal and physical abuse) as well as the relationship of perceived abuse risk with burnout and sense of community. Study 1, comprising of two settings (tertiary care hospital, N = 3,062; psychiatric hospital, N = 383), found gender and occupational group associated with perceived risk of abuse (women felt greater risk than men; nurses felt greater risk than non-nurses). It also found a gender/occupational group interaction. Study 2, conducted at an Irish tertiary care hospital (N = 892), found nurses felt at greater risk for all three types of abuse than did non-nurses. Further, women perceived themselves at greater risk for sexual harassment and verbal abuse than did men; the study found no gender difference regarding physical abuse. The analysis identified a gender/occupational group interaction for sexual harassment. The study considers methods of reducing perceived risk in regard to the research literature on abuse at work.     

The relative impact of workplace bullying as a social stressor at work

Hauge, L. J., Skogstad, A. & Einarsen, S. (2010). The relative impact of workplace bullying as a social stressor at work. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 51, 426–433. Exposure to workplace bullying has been argued to be a severe social stressor and a more crippling and devastating problem for affected individuals than the effects of all other work‐related stressors put together. However, few studies have explicitly investigated this assumption. In a representative sample of the Norwegian working population, the present study investigated the relative contribution of workplace bullying as a predictor of individual and organizational related outcomes after controlling for the well‐documented job stressors of job demands, decision authority, role ambiguity and role conflict. Bullying was found to be a significant predictor of all the outcomes included, showing a substantial relative contribution in relation to anxiety and depression, while for job satisfaction, turnover intention and absenteeism, more modest relative contributions were identified. Workplace bullying is indeed a potent social stressor with consequences similar to, or even more severe than, the effects of other stressors frequently encountered within organizations. Thus, the finding that bullying has a considerable effect on exposed individuals also when controlling for the effects of other job stressors demonstrates bullying as a serious problem at workplaces that needs to be actively prevented and managed in its own right.     

The effects of context change on long-term habituation of the orienting response in humans

Four experiments examined the effects of context change (Experiments 1-3) and context extinction (Experiment 4) on long-term habituation of the skin conductance response. In all experiments, subjects received 15 presentations of a target stimulus in each of two sessions. In Experiment 1 (N=60) there was a 15-min interval between training and test sessions. This interval was extended to 24 hours in Experiments 2 (N=60) and 3 (N=60). The experimental treatment in each of these studies involved a change in context between the two training sessions. None of the experiments provided evidence of context dependency in measures of long-term habituation. In Experiment 4 (N=60) experimental subjects received a period of context extinction during which they remained in the laboratory environment between two series of habituation trials. Again, however, there was no evidence that long-term habituation was contextually mediated. Thus, the results fail uniformly to support theories that argue that long-term habituation is context-dependent.     

Discrimination Reversal Conditioning of an Eyeblink Response is Impaired by NMDA Receptor Blockade

In the present study we examined the effects of the specific NMDA receptor antagonist CPP on discrimination reversal learning in rabbits. We report two primary findings. First, the institution of NMDA receptor blockade had no effect on a learned discrimination. Second, after stimulus reversal, CPP treatment impaired acquisition of the discrimination reversal. This impairment manifested itself early in training as a retardation in acquisition of a CR to the new CS+ and late in training as an inability to suppress responsiveness to the new CS-. Given the comparability of the present results with previously published results for phenytoin-treated rabbits, we suggest that the effects of phenytoin on learning in this paradigm is at least in part mediated by its effects on NMDA receptors. We further suggest that these findings emphasize the need to better define the role of NMDA receptor activation and hippocampally-mediated circuits in a variety of associative learning paradigms.     

Selection through Rejection: Reconsidering the Invariant Learning Paradigm

Two experiments are reported that investigate the nature of selections in the McGeorge and Burton (1990) invariant learning paradigm. McGeorge and Burton suggest that subjects implicitly acquire abstract knowledge of an invariant feature (usually the presence of the digit '3') in a set of 30 stimuli. McGeorge and Burton's analysis has recently been challenged by Cock, Berry, and Gaffan (1994) and by Wright and Burton (1995). In this paper, we demonstrate that performance is based on knowledge of other aspects of the learning set besides the invariant digit, but that this knowledge is still implicit. Altering the nature of the learning stimuli to highlight these co-varying features enhances the effects and increases the reporting of explicit knowledge. Our results indicate that performance within this paradigm is more easily characterized as rejection of salient negatives than selection of positive instances, but that salience is not based simply on similarity.     

Private virtues, public detriment: allocating scarce medical resources to the elderly

Churchill reviews Norman Daniels' Am I My Parents' Keeper (Oxford University Press; 1988) and Daniel Callahan's Setting Limits (Simon & Schuster; 1987). Both books present their authors' reflections on one of the most pressing problems of social ethics, how to allocate health care resources to the elderly in a climate of scarcity. Churchill first analyzes Daniels' response to the problem, the "prudential lifespan account," by which health care rights might give persons legitimate claims to services at one stage of their lives but not at another. This approach is contrasted with Callahan's "return to virtue" argument, which rests upon two major claims, one about the appropriate ends of medicine and the other about the meaning of old age. Churchill discusses both works within the context of the problematic relation in the United States between private and public goods, and between individual and social well-being.     

CAN-4, an advanced author language for CAI,computer-based testing and psychological experimentation: PDP-9 implementation

The effective use of computers for tutorial (programmed instruction) teaching and on-line testing requires that curriculum authors have powerful special-purpose languages. One such language, CAN-4, has been designed and implemented to run on the PDP-9. The language includes advanced scoring, data recording, computation, timing, and file control facilities. The language and its implementation are described in relation to the instructional problems which the facilities are designed to meet.