Colonnello Valentina, Carnevali Luca, Russo Paolo Maria, Ottaviani Cristina, Cremonini Valeria, Venturi Emanuele, Mattarozzi Katia
Department of Experimental, Diagnostic and Specialty Medicine, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy.
Stress Physiology Lab, Department of Chemistry, Life Sciences and Environmental Sustainability, University of Parma, Parma, Italy.
PeerJ. 2021 Jan 13;9:e10610. doi: 10.7717/peerj.10610. eCollection 2021.
The healthcare provider profession strongly relies on the ability to care for others' emotional experiences. To what extent burnout may relate to an actual alteration of this key professional ability has been little investigated. In an experimentally controlled setting, we investigated whether subjective experiences of global burnout or burnout depersonalization (the interpersonal component of burnout) relate to objectively measured alterations in emotion recognition and to what extent such alterations are emotion specific. Healthcare workers ( = 90) completed the Maslach Burnout Inventory and a dynamic emotion recognition task in which faces with neutral emotional expressions gradually changed to display a specific basic emotion (happiness, anger, fear, or sadness). Participants were asked to identify and then classify each displayed emotion. Before the task, a subsample of 46 participants underwent two salivary cortisol assessments. Individuals with global burnout were less accurate at recognizing others' emotional expressions of anger and fear, tending to misclassify these as happiness, compared to individuals without global burnout. Individuals with high burnout depersonalization were more accurate in recognizing happiness and less accurate in recognizing all negative emotions, with a tendency to misclassify the latter as positive ones, compared to healthcare workers with moderate/low depersonalization. Moreover, individuals with high depersonalization-but not participants with global burnout-were characterized by higher cortisol levels. These results suggest that the subjective burnout experience relates to an actual, but selective, reduction in the recognition of facial emotional expressions, characterized by a tendency to misclassify negative emotional expressions as positive ones, perhaps due to an enhanced seeking of positive social cues. This study adds to the understanding of emotional processing in burnout and paves the way for more nuanced studies on the role of altered processing of threat signals in the development and/or persistence of burnout.
医疗保健提供者职业严重依赖于照顾他人情感体验的能力。职业倦怠在多大程度上可能与这种关键职业能力的实际改变有关，目前鲜有人研究。在一个实验控制的环境中，我们调查了整体职业倦怠或职业倦怠去个性化（职业倦怠的人际成分）的主观体验是否与客观测量的情绪识别改变有关，以及这种改变在多大程度上是特定于情绪的。医护人员（n = 90）完成了马氏职业倦怠量表和一项动态情绪识别任务，在该任务中，具有中性表情的面孔逐渐变化以呈现一种特定的基本情绪（快乐、愤怒、恐惧或悲伤）。参与者被要求识别并对每个呈现的情绪进行分类。在任务前，46名参与者的子样本进行了两次唾液皮质醇评估。与没有整体职业倦怠的个体相比，有整体职业倦怠的个体在识别他人的愤怒和恐惧情绪表达时准确性较低，倾向于将这些情绪误分类为快乐。与中度/低度去个性化的医护人员相比，高度职业倦怠去个性化的个体在识别快乐方面更准确，而在识别所有负面情绪方面准确性较低，倾向于将后者误分类为正面情绪。此外，高度去个性化的个体——而非有整体职业倦怠的参与者——其皮质醇水平较高。这些结果表明，主观职业倦怠体验与面部情绪识别方面实际但有选择性的降低有关，其特征是倾向于将负面情绪表达误分类为正面情绪，这可能是由于对积极社会线索的寻求增加所致。这项研究增进了我们对职业倦怠中情绪加工的理解，并为更细致地研究威胁信号加工改变在职业倦怠发展和/或持续中的作用铺平了道路。
