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Reduced recognition of facial emotional expressions in global burnout and burnout depersonalization in healthcare providers

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 subje...

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Autores principales: Colonnello, Valentina, Carnevali, Luca, Russo, Paolo Maria, Ottaviani, Cristina, Cremonini, Valeria, Venturi, Emanuele, Mattarozzi, Katia
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: PeerJ Inc. 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7811292/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33520445
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.10610
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author Colonnello, Valentina
Carnevali, Luca
Russo, Paolo Maria
Ottaviani, Cristina
Cremonini, Valeria
Venturi, Emanuele
Mattarozzi, Katia
author_facet Colonnello, Valentina
Carnevali, Luca
Russo, Paolo Maria
Ottaviani, Cristina
Cremonini, Valeria
Venturi, Emanuele
Mattarozzi, Katia
author_sort Colonnello, Valentina
collection PubMed
description 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 (n = 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.
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spelling pubmed-78112922021-01-28 Reduced recognition of facial emotional expressions in global burnout and burnout depersonalization in healthcare providers Colonnello, Valentina Carnevali, Luca Russo, Paolo Maria Ottaviani, Cristina Cremonini, Valeria Venturi, Emanuele Mattarozzi, Katia PeerJ Nursing 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 (n = 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. PeerJ Inc. 2021-01-13 /pmc/articles/PMC7811292/ /pubmed/33520445 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.10610 Text en © 2021 Colonnello et al. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
spellingShingle Nursing
Colonnello, Valentina
Carnevali, Luca
Russo, Paolo Maria
Ottaviani, Cristina
Cremonini, Valeria
Venturi, Emanuele
Mattarozzi, Katia
Reduced recognition of facial emotional expressions in global burnout and burnout depersonalization in healthcare providers
title Reduced recognition of facial emotional expressions in global burnout and burnout depersonalization in healthcare providers
title_full Reduced recognition of facial emotional expressions in global burnout and burnout depersonalization in healthcare providers
title_fullStr Reduced recognition of facial emotional expressions in global burnout and burnout depersonalization in healthcare providers
title_full_unstemmed Reduced recognition of facial emotional expressions in global burnout and burnout depersonalization in healthcare providers
title_short Reduced recognition of facial emotional expressions in global burnout and burnout depersonalization in healthcare providers
title_sort reduced recognition of facial emotional expressions in global burnout and burnout depersonalization in healthcare providers
topic Nursing
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7811292/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33520445
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.10610
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