Employer-focused interventions targeting disability employment: A systematic review.

There are a wide range of interventions that are designed to influence employer behaviour with respect to the employment of people with disabilities. This study presents the results of a systematic review looking at employer-focused interventions to improve disability employment, focusing on interventions or policies taking placing in high-income countries as per the OECD. This systematic review focuses on a broad range of potential employment-related outcomes, including the employment rate, time to return to work and length of sickness absence. The results of 71 papers that evaluate the effectiveness of a range of interventions were synthesised into a narrative review. Interventions are grouped into six broad categories: anti-discrimination legislation, quota systems, part-time sick leave, graded return to work and wage subsidy schemes. Anti-discrimination legislation is not effective at improving the employment prospects of people with disabilities. There is mixed evidence with respect to quota systems and wage subsidy schemes. However, the availability of part time sick leave or graded return to work are both consistently associated with improved work participation for people with disabilities.

Experience, vulnerability, or overload? Emotional job demands as moderator in trajectories of emotional well-being and job satisfaction across the working lifespan.

Employees exert emotional effort in order to perform their work effectively, albeit to varying degrees based on their occupation. These emotional job demands (EJDs) affect employees' well-being, yet evidence is mixed as to whether these effects are positive or negative. One limiting factor in extant studies is that they investigated short-term effects or cross-sectional relationships between EJDs (usually assessed at the employee level) and work outcomes. The present study used an accelerated longitudinal design with a 10-year timespan of data (effectively covering the whole working lifespan) to test the effects of EJDs at the occupational level on long-term trajectories of well-being. Drawing on the model of strengths and vulnerabilities integration (SAVI) from the lifespan psychology literature, we tested three competing effects: an experience effect (EJDs predict increased well-being), a vulnerability effect (EJDs predict diminished well-being), and an overload effect (a non-linear relationship in which very high levels lead to more unfavorable trajectories). Using data of N = 2,478 working adults in Germany drawn from the Socioeconomic Panel Study (SOEP), in tandem with data on EJDs from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET), we found an overload effect of EJDs on trajectories of positive affect and job satisfaction. However, EJDs did not influence trajectories of negative affect. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory and practice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Keeping (future) rivals down: Temporal social comparison predicts coworker social undermining via future status threat and envy.

The extant social undermining literature suggests that employees envy and, consequently, undermine coworkers when they feel that these coworkers are better off and thus pose a threat to their own current status. With the present research, we draw on the sociofunctional approach to emotions to propose that an anticipated future status threat can similarly incline employees to feel envy toward, and subsequently undermine, their coworkers. We argue that employees pay special attention to coworkers' past development in relation to their own, because faster-rising coworkers may pose a future status threat even if they are still performing worse in absolute terms in the present. With a set of two behavioral experiments (N = 90 and N = 168), we establish that participants react to faster-rising coworkers with social undermining behavior when the climate is competitive (vs. less competitive). We extended these results with a scenario experiment (N = 376) showing that, in these situations, participants extrapolate lower future status than said coworker and thus respond with envy and undermining behavior. A two-wave field study (N = 252) replicated the complete moderated serial mediation model. Our findings help to explain why employees sometimes undermine others who present no immediate threat to their status. As such, we extend theorizing on social undermining and social comparison. (PsycINFO Database Record

Impaired social cognition in multiple sclerosis.

BACKGROUND: Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an inflammatory and neurodegenerative disorder of the CNS that is frequently associated with neuropsychiatric symptoms and decreased quality of life. Social support, which has been found to buffer the psychosocial burden of MS, critically depends on intact social cognition. Here we assess social cognition in patients with MS using a naturalistic video based test and explore if potential deficits in theory of mind (ToM) occur independently of known MS associated neuropsychiatric symptoms, such as depression and cognitive impairment. METHODS: 45 outpatients with clinically definite MS and 45 age, sex and education matched healthy control subjects (HCs) underwent standardised testing using the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition. MS patients also completed a neuropsychological battery. RESULTS: MS patients showed significantly impaired ToM compared with HCs. Impairments were more pronounced in identification of emotions than in identification of thoughts or intentions. Significantly lower ToM compared with HCs was detected in MS patients during the early disease stages, with limited disability and without substantial neuropsychological deficits. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest impaired social cognition in MS. Importantly, ToM impairments in this group may not simply be a consequence of the well known neuropsychological deficits. Difficulties with correctly identifying emotions, thoughts and intentions in social situations may result in interpersonal problems and could contribute to the psychosocial burden of MS.