Sleepiness and days of recovery

In the literature recovery after work is taken for granted – one has 16 h off between work bouts and one has 36 h off each weekend. However, the situation for those working irregular work hours may be quite different because of night work, long shifts, or long sequences of working days. Strictly speaking we don't have any scientific support for theories on how recovery days should be patterned. This paper, therefore, brings together data from a series of our own studies that involve irregular work hours, with the specific purpose of looking at the recovery process. The results show that for the average normal office week worker two days of recovery are normally sufficient. For those who work long shifts in long sequences three days are needed for normalization, whereas 12 h shifts in 2–3 day sequences seem not to cause accumulated fatigue. Interestingly, fatigue/sleepiness is often at its peak during the first day of recovery – not the last day of the working week. Air crew and oil rig workers take a longer time to recover, probably because of too much adjustment of the biological clock. As a rule, long haul air crew is usually much more fatigued than short haul crew during their days off, despite the fact that long haul flying is voluntary and opted for by those who fly it. Also train drivers are affected during their days off by their irregular work hours – in particular backwards rotating schedules seem to cause accumulation of fatigue. The results suggest that one day of recovery never is sufficient, two days usually is, whereas 3–4 days are necessary after periods of severely disturbed circadian rhythmicity.     

Working Together with God: Religious Coping,Perceived Discrimination,and Hypertension

This study examined the relationships of perceived discrimination and religious coping with hypertension in a sample of Black and White Seventh-day Adventists. Data come from a community-based sample of 6128 White American, 2253 African American and 927 Caribbean American adults (67% women; mean age = 62.9 years). Results indicate lifetime unfair treatment was significantly associated with hypertension regardless of race/ethnicity. Positive religious coping was associated with lower odds of hypertension and did not interact with unfair treatment. Both positive and negative religious coping were indirectly associated with increased hypertension risk through an increase in perceived discrimination.

     

The challenge of merging: merger patterns, premerger status, and merger support

Employees of merging organizations often show resistance to the merger. The employees' support depends on the companies' premerger status and on the merger pattern. Based on an intergroup perspective, three studies were conducted to investigate the influence of premerger status (high, low) and merger pattern (assimilation, integration-equality, integration-proportionality, transformation) on participants' support for a pending organizational merger. Students (Study 1) and employees (Study 2) had to take the perspective of employees of a fictitious merging organization. Study 3 investigated students' perceptions of a potentially pending university merger using a 2 (status) x 3 (merger pattern: assimilation, integration-equality, integration-proportionality) design. Across all studies, the low-status group favored integration-equality and transformation whereas the high-status group preferred integration-proportionality and assimilation. Perceived threat mediated the effects. Legitimacy was a stronger mediator for effects of the low-status group.     

Speech perception deficits in Parkinson's disease: underestimation of time intervals compromises identification of durational phonetic contrasts

Besides motor, vegetative, and cognitive signs, patients suffering from Parkinson's disease (PD) may show distinct perceptual deficits such as underestimation of time intervals extending across several seconds. Assuming this impairment also to affect the domain of tens of milliseconds, disrupted encoding of the acoustic speech signal with respect to segment durations conveying linguistic information must be expected. To test this hypothesis, 10 PD patients and matched controls performed an identification task using a series of 10 stimuli derived from the utterance "Boten" (/bo:tn/, 'messengers'; produced with nasal plosion) by exclusive manipulation of occlusion length (110-20 ms in steps of 10 ms). Under these conditions, word-medial silence cues the voicing category of the respective stop consonant. Seven PD subjects showed normal identification curves, i.e., categorized the shortest and longest stimuli with high probability each as the minimal pair cognates "Boden" and "Boten," respectively. In contrast, the remaining three patients labeled all items across the complete range of occlusion lengths as "Boden." A subsequent experiment found a horizontal shift of the identification curves toward larger signal durations (> 120 ms) in these three subjects. Bilateral cerebellar degeneration has been found to yield a different response pattern, i.e., near-chance level of performance. Considering recent information-processing models of scalar interval timing, striatal disorders seem to slow down an oscillatory pacemaker, whereas cerebellar dysfunctions may impair comparison of measured durations with stored reference memory traces.     

The Crisis Support Scale: psychometric qualities and further validation

The objective of the present study was to provide a further validation of the Crisis Support Scale, which is a short scale for measuring social support after a crisis has occurred. The data from eleven trauma studies of 4213 subjects were used to investigate the psychometric properties of the scale and the differences that emerge due to age, gender, and type of trauma. The scale appears to be very robust. Some aspects of crisis support seem to decrease as time goes by while others increase. Women survivors report less support than men both right after the trauma and later on. The younger survivors tend to report the least support in the acute phase although this picture is reversed later on. The various types of trauma have different item profiles, which supports the concurrent validity of the scale.     

Post–traumatic stress disorder in patients with coronary artery disease: A review and evaluation of the risk

Psychosocial factors are known to impact on the prognosis of patients with coronary artery disease independently of disease severity. However, few studies have looked at whether these patients are at risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder, and the potential implications for morbidity and mortality. Through a review of the empirical literature, the objectives were to investigate whether patients with coronary artery disease are at risk of developing this disorder, to look at relations between post-traumatic stress disorder and heart disease, and to stimulate further research. The review indicated that some patients with coronary artery disease are at risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder, although the prevalence varied considerably. Methodological issues together with recommendations for future research are discussed. Although only some cardiac patients may develop post-traumatic stress, this disorder should not be overlooked due to its potential role in reinfarctions and mortality.     

On how high performers keep cool brains in situations of cognitive overload

What happens in the brain when we reach or exceed our capacity limits? Are there individual differences for performance at capacity limits? We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the impact of increases in processing demand on selected cortical areas when participants performed a parametrically varied and challenging dual task. Low-performing participants respond with large and load-dependent activation increases in many cortical areas when exposed to excessive task requirements, accompanied by decreasing performance. It seems that these participants recruit additional attentional and strategy-related resources with increasing difficulty, which are either not relevant or even detrimental to performance. In contrast, the brains of the high-performing participants “keep cool” in terms of activation changes, despite continuous correct performance, reflecting different and more efficient processing. These findings shed light on the differential implications of performance on activation patterns and underline the importance of the interindividual-differences approach in neuroimaging research.     

Recognition and evaluation of emotional prosody in individuals with generalized social phobia: a pilot study

Studies using facial emotional expressions as stimuli partially support the assumption of biased processing of social signals in social phobia. This pilot study explored for the first time whether individuals with social phobia display a processing bias towards emotional prosody. Fifteen individuals with generalized social phobia and fifteen healthy controls (HC) matched for gender, age, and education completed a recognition test consisting of meaningless utterances spoken in a neutral, angry, sad, fearful, disgusted or happy tone of voice. Participants also evaluated the stimuli with regard to valence and arousal. While these ratings did not differ significantly between groups, analysis of the recognition test revealed enhanced identification of sad and fearful voices and decreased identification of happy voices in individuals with social phobia compared with HC. The two groups did not differ in their processing of neutral, disgust, and anger prosody.     

Business owners' action planning and its relationship to business success in three African countries

A model of business success was developed with motivational resources (locus of control, self-efficacy, achievement motivation, and self-reported personal initiative) and cognitive resources (cognitive ability and human capital) as independent variables, business owners' elaborate and proactive planning as a mediator, and business size and growth as dependent variables. Three studies with a total of 408 African micro and small-scale business owners were conducted in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Namibia. Structural equation analyses partially supported the hypotheses on the importance of psychological planning by the business owners. Elaborate and proactive planning was substantially related to business size and to an external evaluation of business success and was a (partial) mediator for the relationship between cognitive resources and business success. The model carries important implications for selection, training, and coaching of business owners.