Gauging the stress of long-term care nursing assistants using ecological momentary assessment, wearable sensors and end of day reconstruction.

BACKGROUND: Nursing assistants working in long-term care (LTC) often report that their job is stressful. To reduce their work stress, a better understanding of their stress profile is needed. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to pilot test methods to identify and understand stressors that LTC nursing assistants experience. METHODS: We asked each participant to provide wearable sensor/watch data, ecological momentary assessment (EMA) surveys and end of day review data over two eight-hour working shifts. RESULTS: Eight nursing assistants participated. All participants worked in a common continuing care retirement community in Maryland, United States of America. Our stress assessment method revealed 83 stressful events that were classified under 10 categories. Most of the reported events were rated as having a mild to low-moderate intensity. The three most common causes of stress were work demands and pressure (28.35%), heavy workload and staffing (19.69%), and safety issues and COVID-19 concerns (17.32%). We also explored the difference between stress events and intensity among different shifts. Disrespect from residents (22.73%) was the most commonly reported stressor during day shifts. Feeling rushed was the most commonly reported stressor during the evening (22.47%) and the night (38.46%) shifts. CONCLUSIONS: We found stress was commonly reported. Stress intensity conflicted with prior literature, and we explored possible explanations. IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE: We discuss potential implications for these findings, modification of our methods to increase feasibility, the utility of these data collection methods for future work and suggest next steps.

Biased cognitive control of emotional information in remitted depression: A meta-analytic review.

Cognitive theories of depression posit that maladaptive information processing increases the risk for depression recurrence. There is increasing theoretical and empirical support for the cognitive control of emotional information as a vulnerability factor for depression recurrence. In this investigation, findings from behavioral studies that compared the cognitive control of emotional information between participants with remitted major depressive disorder (rMDD) and healthy control (HC) participants were examined. Response times (RTs) and error rates were used as outcome variables, and aspects of clinical features, sample characteristics, and methodology and design were examined as moderating variables. The final review included 44 articles with a total of 2,081 rMDD participants and 2,285 HC participants. The two groups significantly differed in the difference score between RTs for negative and positive stimuli. Specifically, the difference in RTs between negative and positive stimuli was larger in participants with rMDD than in HC participants, indicating greater difficulty controlling irrelevant negative (vs. positive) stimuli in rMDD. Such cognitive control bias may be associated with preferential processing of negative over positive information in working memory. This imbalance may then be linked to other emotional information processing biases and emotion dysregulation, thereby increasing the risk for depression recurrence. Implications, limitations, and future directions are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).