Treating Parental Burnout: Impact and Particularities of a Mindfulness- and Compassion-Based Approach.

Mindfulness- and self-compassion-based programs have been shown to reduce parental stress, and levels of mindfulness and self-compassion have been shown to be negatively related to parental burnout (PB) factors. Based on these results, the present study aimed to test the efficacy of an 8-week mindfulness and compassion-based group approach (MCA) (n = 29) compared with the existing Parenting in Balance Program (PBP) (n = 25). Parents were blindly enrolled in one of the two conditions. Parental burnout, parental neglect and violence, irritability, parental balance between stress-enhancing and stress-alleviating factors, hair cortisol, and mindful parenting and self-compassion were measured before, after, and three months after the end of the program. All the measured outcomes positively changed over time in both conditions, except for irritability. Large effect sizes were found for parental burnout, parental neglect and violence, and mindful parenting and self-compassion. However, contrary to our hypothesis, the decrease in parental burnout in the MCA was not significantly related to an increase in mindful parenting nor self-compassion. Furthermore, certain participants from the MCA group reported higher levels of parental burnout after the intervention. The absence of specific effects between MCA and PBP programs suggests the presence of common effectiveness factors. Therefore, future studies need to analyze specific variables that may explain differential effects of programs on parental burnout levels.

Multidimensional factors of burnout in general practice: a cross sectional survey.

BACKGROUND: GPs are particularly vulnerable to job burnout. Tailored prevention and intervention strategies are needed. AIM: To investigate organisational, interpersonal, and individual factors contributing to exhaustion and disengagement at work among GPs. DESIGN & SETTING: We conducted a cross-sectional study in a sample of Belgian GPs. METHOD: A total of 358 doctors (73% females, 301 with complete data) completed an online anonymous questionnaire assessing job burnout, psychosocial characteristics of the work environment, perceived social support in the private domain, emotional competence, and self-compassion. RESULTS: GPs reported moderate levels of exhaustion and disengagement. Regression models showed that included factors jointly explained 69% of the variance in exhaustion and 63% in disengagement. Exhaustion was significantly predicted by female sex (ß effect size = -0.1), high perceived emotional demands (ß = 0.19), as well as low self-compassion (ß = -0.14) and low emotional competence (ß = 0.09). Disengagement was significantly predicted by low seniority (ß = -0.12) and limited opportunities for development (ß = -0.16). Both exhaustion and disengagement were predicted by low perceived quality of work (ß = -0.19 and -0.14, respectively), meaning of work (ß = -0.17 and -0.31, respectively), and role clarity (ß = 0.09 and 0.12, respectively), as well as high perceived work-life conflict (ß = 0.46 and 0.21, respectively). Moreover, GPs working in a multidisciplinary group reported lower levels of exhaustion and disengagement than those working in a monodisciplinary group or a solo practice, and this difference was associated with factors such as work-life conflict. CONCLUSION: Organisational, interpersonal, and intrapersonal factors interact to predict a substantial part of burnout in general practice. The most significant risk factors were perceived work-life conflict and poor meaning of work. Policymakers should work to support more sustainable practices based on the specific needs and constraints reported by GPs.

Impact of emotional competence on physicians' clinical reasoning: a scoping review protocol.

INTRODUCTION: Clinical reasoning (CR) is a key competence for physicians and a major source of damaging medical errors. Many strategies have been explored to improve CR quality, most of them based on knowledge enhancement, cognitive debiasing and the use of analytical reasoning. If increasing knowledge and fostering analytical reasoning have shown some positive results, the impact of debiasing is however mixed. Debiasing and promoting analytical reasoning have also been criticised for their lack of pragmatism. Alternative means of increasing CR quality are therefore still needed. Because emotions are known to influence the quality of reasoning in general, we hypothesised that emotional competence (EC) could improve physicians' CR. EC refers to the ability to identify, understand, express, regulate and use emotions. The influence of EC on CR remains unclear. This article presents a scoping review protocol, the aim of which will be to describe the current state of knowledge concerning the influence of EC on physicians' CR, the type of available literature and finally the different methods used to examine the link between EC and CR. METHOD AND ANALYSIS: The population of interest is physicians and medical students. EC will be explored according to the model of Mikolajczak et al, describing five major components of EC (identify, understand, express, regulate and use emotions). The concept of CR will include terms related to its processes and outcomes. Context will include real or simulated clinical situations. The search for primary sources and reviews will be conducted in MEDLINE (via Ovid), Scopus and PsycINFO. The grey literature will be searched in the references of included articles and in OpenGrey. Study selection and data extraction will be conducted using the Covidence software. Search and inclusion results will be reported using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses extension for scoping review model (PRISMA-ScR). ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: There are no ethical or safety concerns regarding this review. REGISTRATION DETAILS: OSF Registration DOI: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/GM7YD.

[Experiences of frontline caregivers in the midst of a health crisis : a participatory study in the Liege region]. / Face a la COVID-19. Vécu des soignants de la première ligne de soins au cœur de la crise sanitaire : étude participative en région liégeoise.

The aim of this two-stage research was to document the stressors and resources experienced by front-line professional groups at the heart of the health crisis due to COVID-19, as well as to bring out of a multidisciplinary reflection, a series of priority proposals for strengthening the care system. Our results highlighted great interprofessional similarities in terms of negative and positive experiences (e.g., feeling of powerlessness, support among colleagues), as well as professional specificities (e.g., the painful feeling of being «alone at the front¼ among nurses). Although the stress, fatigue and/or lassitude factors cited by the participants were more numerous than the protective factors, several participants experienced an opportunity for personal and professional development. Overall, this research found that all front-line professionals have a role to play in improving and building resilience in the system, and that this role could be most effective if played in a context of increased multidisciplinary coordination and communication.

Cette recherche en deux étapes avait pour but de documenter les stresseurs et les ressources expérimentés par les groupes professionnels de la première ligne au cœur de la crise sanitaire liée à la COVID-19, ainsi que de faire émerger, d'une réflexion pluridisciplinaire, une série de propositions prioritaires pour le renforcement du système de soins. Nos résultats ont mis en lumière de grandes similitudes interprofessionnelles en termes de vécus négatifs et positifs (par exemple, le sentiment d'impuissance, le soutien entre collègues), ainsi que des spécificités professionnelles (par exemple, le sentiment douloureux d'être «seules au front¼ chez les infirmières). Bien que les facteurs de stress, de fatigue et/ou de lassitude cités par les participants soient plus nombreux que les facteurs de protection, plusieurs participants ont expérimenté une opportunité de développement personnel et professionnel. De manière générale, il est ressorti de cette recherche que tous les professionnels de la 1ère ligne de soins ont un rôle à jouer dans l'amélioration et la résilience du système, et que ce rôle pourrait être d'autant plus efficace s'il se jouait dans un contexte de coordination et de communication pluridisciplinaire intensifié.

An Instrument to Operationalize the Balance between Risks and Resources and Predict Job Burnout.

The goal of the present paper was to develop a valid and reliable instrument to operationalize the balance between job demands and resources in order to predict job burnout. After generating the items, we first conducted a cross-sectional study (Study 1) based on 656 participants, which provided preliminary evidence for the validity of the balance. We then conducted a longitudinal study (Study 2) based on 882 participants to improve and validate the final version of the balance. In study 1, the (im)balance between risks and resources explained a high percentage of variance in job burnout (44%) and a significant percentage in job turnover intention (27%) as well as subjective health (12%). In study 2, results indicated that a change in the balance produced significant change in job burnout scores over time. In addition, balance scores positively predicted positive outcomes (i.e., overall job satisfaction and subjective health) and negatively predicted negative outcomes (i.e., job turnover intention, counterproductive behaviors at work, depression, alcohol use, sleep disorders and somatic complaints). Findings support the usefulness of the Balance for clinicians, companies and researchers interested in assessing job demands and resources.

Alexithymia disrupts the beneficial influence of arousal on attention: Evidence from the attentional blink.

Alexithymia is a multifaceted personality construct that encompasses difficulties in identifying and describing feelings along with an externally oriented cognitive style. The influence of alexithymia and arousal on the cognitive processing of emotion is now widely demonstrated. To test the joint influence of alexithymia and arousal on attentional processes, 55 participants completed 2 blocks of attentional blink trials, one after a baseline (relaxed) session and the other after a cycling (aroused) session. The attentional blink task consists in presenting a neutral first to-be-detected target and second targets (T2) that were neutral (e.g., echo), low-arousal (i.e., emptiness), or high-arousal (e.g., murder) words and presented 213 ms after the first target. The results show that alexithymia interacted with arousal (cycling vs. baseline) and type T2, so that arousal was beneficial to detect T2 only for low-alexithymia scorers. The findings are discussed within the framework showing a decoupling between physiological arousal and subjective experience in high-alexithymia scorers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Emotion-specific load disrupts concomitant affective processing.

Findings in the neuroimaging literature suggest that separate brain circuitries are involved when individuals perform emotional compared to nonemotional working memory (WM) tasks. Here we test this hypothesis with behavioural measures. We predicted that the conceptual processing of affect would be disrupted more by concurrent affective than nonaffective load. Participants performed a conceptual task in which they verified affective versus sensory properties of concepts, and a second, concurrent, working memory (n-back) task in which the target stimuli were facial expressions. Results revealed that storing and updating affective (as compared with identity) features of facial expressions altered performance more for affective than for sensory properties of concepts. The findings are supportive of the ideas that affective resources exist and that these resources are specifically used during the processing and representation of affective properties of objects and events.

Joint effect of alexithymia and mood on the categorization of nonverbal emotional vocalizations.

The role of stable factors, such as alexithymia (i.e., difficulties identifying and expressing feelings, externally oriented cognitive style), or temporary factors, such as affective states (mood), on emotion perception has been widely investigated in the literature. However, little is known about the separate or joint effect of the alexithymia level and affective states (positive affectivity, negative affectivity) on the recognition of nonverbal emotional vocalizations (NEV) (e.g., laughs, cries, or sighs). In this study, participants had to categorize NEV communicating 10 emotions by selecting the correct verbal emotional label. Results show that the level of alexithymia is negatively correlated to the capacity to accurately categorize negative vocalizations, and more particularly sad NEV. On the other hand, negative affectivity appeared negatively correlated with the ability to accurately categorize NEV in general, and negative vocalizations in particular. After splitting the results by the alexithymia level (high vs. low scorers), significant associations between mood and accuracy rates were found in the group of high alexithymia scorers only. These findings support the idea that alexithymic features act across sensory modalities and suggest a mood-interference effect that would be stronger in those individuals.