Trends in burnout syndrome and emotional factors: an assessment of anesthesiologists in Southern Brazil, 2012

Burnout syndrome (BOS) is the result of chronic stress at work, and is characterized by emotional exhaustion (EE), depersonalization (DP), and low professional accomplishment. Anesthesiologyis a stressful profession. The aim of this study was to assess the prevalence of burnout as well as the sociodemographic and working characteristics associated with this syndrome’s emotional factors, in anesthesiologists from Southern Brazil. We assessed burnout severity, depressive symptoms, and self-esteem using the Maslach burnout inventory, the Beck depression inventory, and the Rosenberg self-esteem scale, respectively. Of the 198 anesthesiologists included in this study, 48.7% were positive for burnout, 26.9% for EE, 41.3% for DP and 32.7% for low personal accomplishment. Trends in BOS was associated with a younger age, difficulty to conciliate family and work demands, low self-esteem, and depressive symptoms.     

Procura-PALavras (P-PAL): A Web-based interface for a new European Portuguese lexical database

In this article, we present Procura-PALavras (P-PAL), a Web-based interface for a new European Portuguese (EP) lexical database. Based on a contemporary printed corpus of over 227 million words, P-PAL provides a broad range of word attributes and statistics, including several measures of word frequency (e.g., raw counts, per-million word frequency, logarithmic Zipf scale), morpho-syntactic information (e.g., parts of speech [PoSs], grammatical gender and number, dominant PoS, and frequency and relative frequency of the dominant PoS), as well as several lexical and sublexical orthographic (e.g., number of letters; consonant–vowel orthographic structure; density and frequency of orthographic neighbors; orthographic Levenshtein distance; orthographic uniqueness point; orthographic syllabification; and trigram, bigram, and letter type and token frequencies), and phonological measures (e.g., pronunciation, number of phonemes, stress, density and frequency of phonological neighbors, transposed and phonographic neighbors, syllabification, and biphone and phone type and token frequencies) for ~53,000 lemmatized and ~208,000 nonlemmatized EP word forms. To obtain these metrics, researchers can choose between two word queries in the application: (i) analyze words previously selected for specific attributes and/or lexical and sublexical characteristics, or (ii) generate word lists that meet word requirements defined by the user in the menu of analyses. For the measures it provides and the flexibility it allows, P-PAL will be a key resource to support research in all cognitive areas that use EP verbal stimuli. P-PAL is freely available at http://p-pal.di.uminho.pt/tools.     

Team adaptability and task cohesion as resources to the non-linear dynamics of workload and sickness absenteeism in firefighter teams

ABSTRACT

The current study builds on the non-linear Dynamic Systems (NDS) perspective to test the assumption that change in sickness absenteeism is non-linear, and that such change is due to workload, team adaptability and task cohesion. Participants were 37 firefighter teams (n = 250 individuals) from a main European capital city. The research hypotheses were tested using SPSS and the “cusp” package, in the statistical software R. The results suggest that change in sickness absenteeism behaviours over time is non-linear, with the cusp catastrophe model predicting such behaviours better than the linear and logistic models. In our model, task cohesion functions as an asymmetry factor (i.e., the independent variable that determines the strength and discrepancy between the two stable states of the dependent variable) leading to a linear change in sickness absenteeism. Interestingly, both workload and team adaptability function as bifurcation (i.e., the independent variable that determines the change between the two stable states of the order parameter) and asymmetry factors leading to non-linear and linear change in sickness absenteeism over time. This study contributes to the growing evidence that incorporating the NDS perspective enables a better understanding of action teams, namely those working in extreme environments.