Dietary Supplements

Results from the 14th annual consumer survey conducted by the American Massage Therapy Association® (AMTA®) indicate the use of massage among men has dropped from 18 percent in 2009 to 10 percent in 2010, a drop that is attributed to the lagging economy these past two years. The survey results were announced at the AMTA National Convention in Minneapolis, September 22-25, 2010.

Recent statistics have indicated men have been putting off their healthcare appointments this year including visits for regular check-ups, screenings and vaccinations. According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) about 57 percent of men have visited a physician within the past year, compared with about 74 percent of women. This trend is now impacting massage therapy in men.

Massage use among women only dropped from 26 percent in 2009 to 25 percent in 2010. Because of the lower use of massage by men, the percentage of all adults who had a massage in the previous 12 months dropped from 22 percent in 2009 to 18 percent in 2010.

“We know from our AMTA survey results in the last 14 years that massage therapy usage has been on an overall upward trend, as people are realizing the health benefits of massage to manage pain and keep them active, as well as being an excellent means to relieve stress” says Kathleen Miller-Read, AMTA president. “We believe that as the economic climate improves, men will return to massage therapy as part of their regular health maintenance plan.”

Americans Are Reaching to Massage for Pain Relief

There have been a growing number of people in recent years seeking massage as part of health care and an increase in physician referrals to massage therapists. Because of this trend and a steadily rising number of massage therapists working in health care environments, this year’s AMTA convention includes educational sessions on massage for the relief of pain stemming from a variety of causes, as well as for pregnancy, sports injuries and cancer. The vast majority of Americans, 86 percent, still agree that massage can be effective in reducing pain, a number that has held strong from 2009, while 84 percent agree massage can be beneficial for health and wellness. More than half of the men and women surveyed said they have had a massage to relieve pain.

Americans Still See the Benefits of Massage, Particularly Those Who are Stressed

About 40 percent of stressed out Americans are getting massages to relieve their stress, which has increased from 32 percent in 2009.

“Stress, among other factors, is a popular reason why people get massage,” says Miller-Read. “In a year where the economy is such a stress inducer, AMTA is pleased that people are increasingly turning to massage for stress relief.”

Source:

American Massage Therapy Association (AMTA)

Some people always know which way is north and how to get out of a building. Others can live in an apartment for years without knowing which side faces the street. Differences among people that include spatial skills, experience, and preferred strategies for wayfinding are part of what determines whether people get lost in buildings – and psychological scientists could help architects understand where and why people might get lost in their buildings, according to the authors of an article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

When you enter a new building, you build a cognitive map – a representation in your mind of the objects and locations in that environment. Success in navigating in the building may depend upon what information you put into the cognitive map. “For example, imagine visiting a new doctor’s office. You walk in the front door and find your way to the office, storing information about your route and the objects you encounter in your cognitive map. What is most interesting is how this information is then used to direct you back to the front door after the office visit.

“If you paid attention to the sequence of turns along the path, then you may have difficulty because you need to remember to reverse the sequence, and this becomes increasingly difficult as the number of turns increases. But instead, if you paid more attention to the objects that you passed, then you may navigate back to the front door by going from one familiar object to another without considering the sequence of turns. This strategy will work, as long as you can always see a familiar object. If you get lost and enter an unexplored part of the building, you will have difficulty finding your way back,” says Laura A. Carlson of the University of Notre Dame, first author of the article.

In some buildings, the strategies people use and the quality of their cognitive map may not matter very much. “If the building has an obvious structure, with long lines of sight, you won’t have to rely much on this internal representation of your path,” says Carlson.

Some buildings, on the other hand, make it difficult. Carlson and her coauthors, Christoph HГ¶lscher of the University of Freiburg, Thomas F. Shipley of Temple University, and Ruth Conroy Dalton of University College, London, use the Seattle Central Library as an example. The bold building, designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, opened in 2004 and won awards for its design. But visitors complain that it’s difficult to navigate. People expect floors to have similar layouts, but the first five levels of the library are all different; even the outside walls don’t necessarily line up. Normally, lines of sight help people get around, but the library has long escalators that skip over levels, making it hard to see where they go.

For building users who may find navigating in new environments challenging, there are strategies that are helpful. “I used to worry when I explore a new city by myself that I would not find my way back to the hotel,” Carlson says. “However, this simple trick is effective. At each intersection where I need to turn, I spin around to see what the intersection will look like from my return perspective. That way, I will be able to recognize it from the other direction, and I can store that view also in my cognitive map.” This strategy also tends to work well for indoor navigation.

Architects, on the other hand, may be among the class of people with very strong spatial skills, because their craft requires numerous spatial transformations, such as needing to envision 3D space from 2D depictions. One unanticipated consequence of such abilities is that they may not be very good at taking the perspective of a user with poorer spatial skills, and therefore may not be able to fully anticipate where users may have navigational difficulties within their buildings.

Architects and cognitive scientists could learn from each other, Carlson says. Architects could explain how they use building features to encourage certain patterns of movement within the building, informing research on how people move through space; scientists could contribute data on how we build cognitive maps and what strategies different people use to find their way around.

Source:
Keri Chiodo
Association for Psychological Science

Responding to Professor Michael Harrington’s independent review of the Work Capability Assessment published this week, Dr Jed Boardman said:

“The Independent Review of the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) has today published its findings and recommendations. The Royal College of Psychiatrists welcomes the report and hopes that the Government responds to the concerns it raises.

“We have been aware for several years that the WCA is a flawed process and often denies people with mental health problems the benefits that they are entitled to. The Independent Review has picked up many of the problems in the process of assessment that contribute to this. The process needs urgent revision to ensure that it is fair and effective. At present the government are planning to reassess many claimants who are on the older form of Incapacity Benefit and move them onto the newer Employment and Support Allowance. We would like to see this reassessment delayed until the WCA is reformed and working effectively.”

Click here to view references.

Note

The Work Capability Assessment (WCA) was introduced in October 2008 to assess entitlement to Employment and Support Allowance (ESA). Section 10 of the Welfare Reform Act 2007 commits the Secretary of State to lay an independent report before Parliament each year for the first five years of operation. On 29 June 2010 the Secretary of State appointed Professor Malcolm Harrington to undertake the first of these independent reviews. The Department for Work and Pensions published his review on 23 November 2010, alongside the Government’s response to it.

Source:

Royal College of Psychiatrists

You may think of your love for your mate as the noble emotion of a pure heart, but some primitive parts of your brain are taking a decidedly more pragmatic approach to the subject, according to Stanford biologists.

In experiments with African cichlid fish, the scientists discovered that when a female shows a preference for a particular male, but then witnesses him losing a fight with another male, her feelings toward him change.

Areas of the female’s brain associated with anxiety showed increased activity after witnessing an altercation.

“It is the same as if a woman were dating a boxer and saw her potential mate get the crap beat out of him really badly,” said Julie Desjardins, a postdoctoral researcher in biology. “She may not consciously say to herself, ‘Oh, I’m not attracted to this guy anymore because he’s a loser,’ but her feelings might change anyhow.”

“Our intuition is that this response is likely to occur under similar conditions in humans because the brain areas involved are present in all vertebrates and perform comparable functions,” said Russ Fernald, a professor of biology.

Desjardins is the first author of a paper describing the research, to be published online this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Fernald and Jill Klausner, a recent honors biology graduate whose thesis was on this topic, are coauthors.

Desjardins said that with people, the subconscious change of heart would likely happen in response to a failure in any competitive situation – whether it’s losing at a game or missing out on a promotion at work – not just a brawl. She said that men might also feel differently after seeing a “female of interest” fail at something competitive.

But all is not necessarily lost for the loser – at least not the human one.

All is not lost for the loser

We can take heart, she said, because we have so much more cognitive ability than fish and can reason our way out of these subtle twinges of doubt. And not all pair-bonding relationships are equal.

“Obviously, long-term committed relationships are very different than, say, people who have just started dating, or are in the initial phases of mate choice,” Desjardins said. So losing a game of beer pong may – or may not – have relationship-ending consequences.

Among the fish, the researchers also found that when the preferred male prevailed, the female showed increased excitation in parts of the brain associated with reproduction, as well as some of the brain’s pleasure centers.

“In this case, she is turning on her body to get ready to physically mate with this male that she previously chose,” Desjardins said. The female also appears to be feeling some sort of pleasurable stimulus in her body, she said.

Desjardins said that while humans may reason beyond the sort of gut reactions displayed in the female cichlids, the human version of the brain regions involved in the fishes’ decisions probably play a major role in the snap judgments men and women make.

“You may not know immediately why you are attracted to a certain person, for example,” she said. “But it is these sorts of unconscious internal reflexes that we have that are shared with all vertebrates, including fish, that make us feel one way or another before we’ve even had time to think about it.”

These same areas of the brain also probably play a part in other types of reflexive responses, such as a mother’s instinct to protect her child.

Fishy flirtation

Desjardins and her colleagues conducted their experiments using a fish tank split into three sections by transparent barriers. In the middle section, they put the female, with a male in each tank on either side of her. The males were always of comparable size and weight – as similar as possible.

For two days in a row, for 20 minutes a day, they placed the same three fish in the same three sections of the tank.

The female would typically swim around for a while, then settle down and interact with the male she preferred.

“We know that she prefers a particular male because she will display some mating behavior and he will try to do the same on his side,” Desjardins said. Once a female had chosen, she never wavered – until the fight.

On the third day, the researchers took one of the male fish and put him into the compartment of the other male fish. Cichlid males are highly territorial, so fighting ensued instantly.

Piscine pugilism

“In this fish species, fighting means a lot,” Desjardins said. “When you fight with a neighbor, you not only physically fight with them, you are also displaying your abilities and your prowess to everyone watching.”

The fishy fisticuffs were allowed to continue for 20 minutes, while the female watched. After that time, the researchers knew the female’s brain would show clear evidence of her reaction.

Desjardins said that when they dissected a female’s brain, they invariably found strong evidence of heightened activity that corresponded with whether the fish’s preferred potential mate had won or lost. The researchers ran the experiment with 15 different females.

“I was extremely surprised by how large a difference in brain activity we were able to measure,” Desjardins said. “To an outside observer like me, it always looked like the same thing – two similar fish fighting. But to the females, it meant something very different.”

Because the female fish had to be dissected in order to assess the activity in their brains, the researchers weren’t able to test whether the females’ reactions to the fights carried over into influencing their actual mating behavior.

But, Desjardins said, “Now that we know the females consistently react to the fights so strongly, we should be able to answer the burning question, “Will she really dump the loser she used to like in favor of the winner?”

Source:
Louis Bergeron
Stanford University

It’s never fun riding the bench – but could it also make you less likely to be physically active in the future?

That’s one of the questions being explored by Mark Eys, an associate professor of kinesiology and physical education at Wilfrid Laurier University and the Canada Research Chair in Group Dynamics and Physical Activity. Eys is presenting his work as part of this week’s Canada Research Chairs conference in Toronto.

Eys, who also teaches out of the university’s psychology department, is studying group cohesion – which, in sporting terms, is essentially that sense of camaraderie that often develops between teammates – and how it affects the willingness of teenagers to take part in physical activity long-term.

It’s an important connection to study, he says, since it’s much more common for people to work out in groups than on their own.

“People playing sports, for instance, are usually part of a group. If they’re playing golf, they’re in a group. They’re often going for runs in a group,” says Eys.

“If we understand how those groups work, and take advantage of those situations, we can facilitate physical activity.”

For the past two years, Eys and his team of graduate students have been observing teens aged 13-17 in the Sudbury area, tracking them as they take part in high school sports, rec leagues, and non-structured group activities like running and jogging.

Once a year, says Eys, they fill out questionnaires that measure how they feel about the level of cohesion in their groups. The teens taking part in highly-structured sports, particularly at the high school level, are asked specifically about their teams’ focus – how it strikes a balance between self-improvement and winning.

While they’re still analyzing the first two years of data, Eys points out that, so far, they’ve found “a really strong relationship between that motivational climate and perceptions of cohesion.”

That relationship seems to echo the findings of researchers who’ve posed the same questions to adults, says Eys.

“If you look at the research on adults, the link between group perceptions and cohesion is pretty clear,” he says. “If people are in groups that they enjoy, they’re more likely to stick to their exercise regimens.”

For Eys, his research isn’t purely academic – it’s also personal. A decade ago, Eys played basketball at the University of Waterloo, and in his fourth year made it to nationals. While the team didn’t win, they managed to strike a near-perfect balance, he says, between competitiveness and camaraderie.

“We still, to this day – and this is ten years after the fact – get together as a group. It was obviously a very cohesive bunch. I don’t think we were necessarily the most talented group in the league, but some of these group processes can overcome that.”

Eys also has two daughters, aged six and four, who are “taking their first steps into organized activities.” Researching what it is that makes a good group activity, he says, will translate into an increased likelihood that physically active kids become physically active adults.

The goal of his research is to “have something to be able to take to coaches, to be able to take to organizations” that would outline all those factors that go into a cohesive group environment. Making kids play better, may help them play longer.

The study will continue for at least one more year and is expected to expand to include kids in the Kitchener-Waterloo area, says Eys.

Source:
Ryan Saxby Hill
Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Children living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods are more likely to succeed if they participate in a community-based prevention program, according to findings released recently from a multi-year research study based at Queen’s University.

Children participating in the Better Beginnings, Better Futures (BBBF) project showed improved social and academic functioning. The project also impacted positively on families and on neighbourhoods.

“The results from our study indicate that the project has been a success,” says Queen’s psychology professor emeritus Ray Peters, the lead researcher on the study. “The project was designed to prevent young children in low-income, high-risk neighbourhoods from experiencing poor developmental outcomes, and to decrease the use of expensive health, education and social services. The study has proven that goal to be attainable.”

The BBBF study is the most ambitious research project of its kind in Canada to date. 601 children between four and eight years old and their families as well as 358 children and their families from sociodemographically-matched comparison communities participated in the study. Extensive follow-up data were collected when the children were in Grades 3, 6, 9 and 12.

The researchers found marked positive effects in social and school functioning domains in Grades 6 and 9 and evidence of fewer emotional and behavioural problems in school. In Grade 12, study results continued to show positive effects on school functioning for BBBF children, who were also less likely to have committed property offences. Parents from BBBF sites reported greater feelings of social support and more positive ratings of marital satisfaction and general family functioning, especially at the Grade 9 follow-up. Positive neighborhood-level effects were also evident.

Economic analyses also showed BBBF participation was associated with significant government savings per child.

The Society for Research in Child Development, an international association with a membership of 5,500 researchers and practitioners from more than 50 countries, has published a 150-page monograph detailing the research findings.

The research was funded by the Government of Ontario, Ontario Mental Health Foundation, National Crime Prevention Centre and Public Safety Canada.

Source:
Michael Onesi

Queen’s University

Effects of Adult Attachment and Emotional Distractors on Brain Mechanisms of Cognitive Control

Stacie L. Warren, Kelly K. Bost, Glenn I. Roisman, Rebecca Levin Silton, Jeffrey M. Spielberg, Anna S. Engels, Eunsil Choi, Bradley P. Sutton, Gregory A. Miller, and Wendy Heller

Adults with insecure attachment styles may have difficulties regulating emotions and this may put them at an increased risk for mental health problems. Volunteers underwent fMRI scans while performing an emotion-word Stroop task. Participants with tendencies towards insecure attachment demonstrated more activity in the right orbitofrontal cortex and superior frontal gyrus for unpleasant words, suggesting that insecure attachment may involve intense reactions to negative words. In addition, insecure volunteers also demonstrated more activity in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex for pleasant words, indicating that these individuals may require greater effort to overcome the tendency for pleasant words to capture their attention.

For Whom Is Parting With Possessions More Painful? Cultural Differences in the Endowment Effect

William W. Maddux, Haiyang Yang, Carl Falk, Hajo Adam, Wendi Adair, Yumi Endo, Ziv Carmon, and Steven J. Heine

It can be painful parting with a prized possession and new findings suggest that in certain cultures it may be even more difficult to give up objects. The endowment effect describes the tendency for owners (potential sellers) to value objects more than potential buyers. European and East Asian volunteers were assigned to the role of buyers or sellers of coffee mugs or chocolates. A significant endowment effect (i.e., owners’ average selling price was higher than buyers’ average purchase price) emerged in the overall sample, but the effect was significantly larger for Western volunteers than for East Asian volunteers. The findings suggest that the endowment effect may be influenced by the degree to which independence and self-enhancement (vs. interdependence and self-criticism) are culturally valued.

Task Usefulness Affects Perception of Rivalrous Images

Adrien Chopin and Pascal Mamassian

Binocular rivalry occurs when each eye is presented with a different image and conscious awareness alternates between both images but does not combine them together. There is new evidence that the image that is more useful for an auxiliary task (e.g., a separate visual search task conducted almost at the same time as the binocular rivalry task) will be seen more than the other, suggesting that task usefulness may change the appearance of a stimulus.

A New Look at Sensory Attenuation: Action-Effect Anticipation Affects Sensitivity, Not Response Bias

Pedro Cardoso-Leite, Pascal Mamassian, Simone SchГјtz-Bosbach, and Florian Waszak

It is difficult to tickle oneself. Anticipating our own touch can result in sensory attenuation – filtering out unnecessary information from our environment – reducing our touch perception. Results of a new study demonstrate sensory attenuation based on learned arbitrary associations between movements and visual effects: Perception of visual effects is impaired when the effects are due to an action habitually producing those effects. During the first part of the experiment (acquisition phase), left-key presses and right-key presses produced tilted patches. In the subsequent test phase, volunteers’ sensitivity to those patches was reduced when the patches were triggered by the key press previously associated with them.

Electrophysiological Evidence for Parallel Response Selection in Skilled Typists

Gordon D. Logan, A. Eve Miller, and David L. Strayer

Numerous behavioral and psychophysiological studies suggest that people are able to select only one response at a time. However, a new study suggests that parallel response selection may occur during skilled typing. Lateralized readiness potentials (LRP; recorded from electrode sites on the scalp over primary motor cortex and reflects the difference in activation of responses in two hands) were recorded as typists typed words with keystrokes distributed between both hands. Analysis of the LRP recordings showed that the LRP amplitude decreased for the first keystroke as progressively more keystrokes were activated in the opposite hand, supporting parallel response selection. This type of response selection may be the result of extensive practice – the volunteers in this study were extremely skilled typists while other studies of this nature typically involve participants with limited practice on a task.

Why Barack Obama Is Black: A Cognitive Account of Hypodescent

Jamin Halberstadt, Steven J. Sherman, and Jeffrey W. Sherman

Hypodescent is the association of individuals of mixed-race ancestry with the minority or socially subordinate group. This may be the result of an individual’s learning history, and not necessarily the product of racist or political motivation. Volunteers (native Chinese and native Caucasian New Zealanders) had to quickly classify photos of racially ambiguous individuals (created by morphing a Chinese face with a Caucasian face). Ambiguous faces were classified as Chinese more often by Caucasian than by Chinese participants. Findings suggest that hypodescent may be explained by attention theory, which assumes that minority groups are learned later than the majority group and that learning minority groups requires attention to their distinctive features.

Source:
Keri Chiodo
Association for Psychological Science

Many people say they wouldn’t cheat on a test, lie on a job application or refuse to help a person in need.

But what if the test answers fell into your lap and cheating didn’t require any work on your part? If you didn’t have to face the person who needed your help and refuse them? Would that change your behaviour?

New research out of the University of Toronto Scarborough shows it might. In two studies that tested participants’ willingness to behave immorally, the UTSC team discovered people will behave badly – if it doesn’t involve too much work on their part.

“People are more likely to cheat and make immoral decisions when their transgressions don’t involve an explicit action,” says Rimma Teper, PhD student and lead author on the study, published online now in Social Psychological and Personality Science. “If they can lie by omission, cheat without doing much legwork, or bypass a person’s request for help without expressly denying them, they are much more likely to do so.”

In one study, participants took a math test on a computer after being warned there were glitches in the system. One group was told if they pressed the space bar, the answer to the question would appear on the screen. The second group was told if they didn’t press the enter key within five seconds of seeing a question, the answer would appear.

“People in the second group – those who didn’t have to physically press a button to get the answers – were much more likely to cheat,” says Associate Psychology Professor Michael Inzlicht, second author on the study.

In another study, the team asked participants whether they would volunteer to help a student with a learning disability complete a component of the test. One group of participants had only the option of checking a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ box that popped up on the computer. The second group of people could follow a link at the bottom of the page to volunteer their help or simply press ‘continue’ to move on to the next page of their test. Participants were five times more likely to volunteer when they had to expressly pick either ‘yes’ or ‘no.’

“It seems to be more difficult for people to explicitly deny their help, by clicking ‘no,’ than it is for them to simply click ‘continue’ and elude doing the right thing. We suspect that emotion plays an important role in driving this effect” says Teper.

“When people are confronted with actively doing the right thing or the wrong thing, there are a lot of emotions involved – such as guilt and shame – that guide them to make the moral choice. When the transgression is more passive, however, we saw more people doing the wrong thing, and we believe this is because the moral emotions in such situations are probably less intense,” Teper says.

The team’s research on moral behaviour is unique in that it looks at how people behave in certain situations versus simply asking them to predict how they might behave, says Inzlicht. It also has critical implications for those in the business of soliciting peoples’ good will, money or time.

“Forcing people to make an active, moral decision – a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to donating, for example – is going to be much more effective than allowing them to passively skip over a request,” he says.

Source:
University of Toronto

SAGE has partnered with the Society for the Teaching of Psychology to begin publishing its official journal, Teaching of Psychology (TOP), starting with the January 2011 issue.

Publishing the best in the latest research about the teaching and learning of psychology, the quarterly Teaching of Psychology is the leading source of information and a forum for new ideas for all those who teach psychology.

“Psychology continues to be offered to more high school students with each passing year. It is one of the most popular undergraduate majors, and thousands of students begin graduate studies in the field each year,” said TOP editor Andrew N. Christopher. “We at the Society for the Teaching of Psychology are excited to begin our partnership with SAGE and its breadth and depth in publishing psychology and education resources with global distribution.”

The Society for the Teaching of Psychology functions as Division 2 of the American Psychological Association (APA), and works to advance understanding of the discipline by promoting excellence in the teaching and learning of psychology.

“Teaching of Psychology has a long history and is the go-to journal for the latest in research and resources for those who teach psychology, at any level,” said Jayne Marks, SAGE Vice President and Editorial Director, Library Information Group. “TOP will be joining a strong and vibrant group of journals in this important area and we look forward to working with the editorial team to help the journal to grow.”

Source:
Jim Gilden

SAGE Publications

This study addresses depression and burn-out among a sample of psychiatrists collected at a professional congress. Within several constraints, the results indicate an high self-rated lifetime prevalence of depression of 41.6% among the sample. Also noteworthy is that a fifth (20.3%) of the sample showed evidence of acute depressive symptoms.

A study published in the current issue of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics addresses depression and burn-out among psychiatrists. Numerous studies have shown that physicians have a high risk of developing depression or burnout syndrome. Data gained from smaller samples indicate that psychiatrists and psychotherapists are at particular risk of developing psychological problems. In this cross-sectional study, a group of German investigators examined the mental health of psychiatrists and psychotherapists in a larger German sample while focusing on depression, burnout and effort-reward imbalance. At the annual congress of the German Association of Psychiatry.

Psychotherapy and Nervous Diseases (DGPPN) in 2006, the investigators distributed 2,430 questionnaires (return rate 51.8%); 1,089 questionnaires of 570 males (52%) and 519 females (48%) formed the final sample. The mean age was 45.4 years (SD = 8.5, range 26-69 years). The questionnaire contained questions on personal status, work situation and medication intake.

The following self-rating scales were included: Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), Maslach Burnout Inventory-D and Effort-Reward Imbalance Questionnaire. On the BDI, 868 of 1,089 (79.7%) scored < 11, indicating little or no current depression, 159 (14.6%) between 11 and 17 points, suggesting a mild depression, and 62 (5.7%) scored ≥ 18 points indicating at least moderate depression. Moreover, 450 of 1,081 (41.6%) psychiatrists indicated they had suffered at least one depressive episode according to the ICD-10 criteria; 152 of 472 (32.2%) reported a depressive episode diagnosed by a specialist; 23 of 1,082 (2.1%) had attempted suicide.

At the time of the study, 46 of 1,086 (4.2%) were undergoing psychotherapy, and 324 of 1,089 (29.7%) had completed psychotherapeutic treatments beyond the psychotherapy sessions mandatory for training in psychiatry. Of the 1,077 who replied, 13.3% took at least one psychotropic or analgesic medication regularly at the time of the study: 63 (5.9%) antidepressants, 27 (2.5%) sedatives, and 74 (6.9%) analgesics. An emotional exhaustion score of > 4.5 was reached by 131 of 1,089 (12.0%) of the sample, but only 8 (0.7%) scored > 4.5 for depersonalisation, and only 2 (0.2%) scored < 2.5 for personal accomplishment. A negative effort-reward imbalance (>1) was shown by 163 of 841 (19.3%) in the sample, whereas 114 (10.5%) of the total sample (n = 1,087) displayed evidence of overcommitment.

One substantial finding of the study is the high self-rated lifetime prevalence of depression of 41.6% among these psychiatrists. Also noteworthy is that a fifth (20.3%) of the sample showed evidence of acute depressive symptoms. One possible interpretation is that psychiatrists are subject to more strain than the normal population (e.g. the handling of suicidal or aggressive patients). On the other hand, psychiatrists are more sensitive to depressive symptoms, more aware of their own mental symptoms, and probably have a higher ability for introspection.

The major limitations of this study are that it is based on a sample collected at a professional congress and it is cross-sectional in nature; thus, the results are not generalisable to other collectives. Further longitudinal studies that compare, for example, psychiatrists with physicians of other medical specialisations are necessary to determine the specificity of the these results and to analyse how stress, due to a specific work, can cause burnout and depression.

Sources: Journal of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, AlphaGalileo Foundation.