Relationships between cognitive appraisal and roles/personality traits in basic life support

OBJECTIVE: To examine the relationship between the cognitive assessment of stress (cognitive appraisal) caused in a scenario requiring basic life support (BLS) and the roles during BLS/personality traits in nursing students. METHODS: We conducted an anonymous self-administered questionnaire survey for 264 freshman and senior nursing students. The study period was one month from June 2019. The questionnaire included characteristics, roles (active involvement group/passive involvement group/no involvement group), Cognitive Appraisal Rating Scale (CARS), and Maudsley Personality Inventory (MPI). We only included data for female students (107 people) in the analysis because very little data is available for male students. The Mann-Whitney test was used for the comparison between two groups and the Kruskal-Wallis test was used for the comparison between three groups. The significance level was set at p<0.05. RESULTS: The total number of responses was 133 (50.4%), and the number of valid responses was 107 (40.5%). As a result of analyzing the relationship between the role and the CARS subscale, the controllability of the active and passive involvement groups was significantly lower than that of the no involvement group (p=0.046). Also, the analysis of the relationship between the grade and the CARS subscale showed that the controllability was significantly lower in freshmen than seniors (p=0.020). CONCLUSION: This study showed the relationship between controllability and cognitive appraisal of stress in the simulation scenario of BLS. Therefore, it was suggested that support for improving controllability is necessary as a preventive measure to reduce the stress associated with BLS.