Work stress and attentional difficulties: An initial study on burnout and cognitive failures

Professional burnout is a stress-related disorder, having mental exhaustion due to work stress as its most important characteristic. Burned out individuals also often complain about attentional problems. However, it is currently not clear whether such complaints are based on true cognitive deficits or whether they merely reflect the way burned out individuals rate their own cognitive performance. To confirm the cognitive complaints we used a cognitive failure questionnaire (CFQ) to assess the level of self-reported attentional difficulties in daily life. We also measured performance on tasks of sustained attention and response inhibition (the SART and the Bourdon-Wiersma Test). We compared three groups: (1) a group of 'burned out' individuals (n=13) who stopped working due to their symptoms and sought professional treatment; (2) teachers at a vocational training institute (n=16) who reported high levels of burnout symptoms but continued to work; and (3) teachers from the same institute (n=14) who reported no burnout symptoms. The level of burnout symptoms was found to be significantly related to the number of cognitive failures in daily life, and to inhibition errors and performance variability in the attentional tasks. To our knowledge, explicit tests of objective cognitive deficits in burned out individuals have not been conducted before. Consequently, this is the first study to indicate that burnout is associated with difficulties in voluntary control over attention and that the level of such difficulties varies with the severity of burnout symptoms.     

Introduction to the Special Issue: Global Perspectives on Vocational Guidance

This special issue of The Career Development Quarterly presents the outcomes from an international symposium, titled International Perspectives on Career Development, jointly sponsored by the International Association for Educational and Vocational Guidance and the National Career Development Association. The articles in this special issue discuss international perspectives on and comparative approaches to educational and vocational guidance that differentiate career development practices in different nations. In addition to the articles in this issue, a selection of papers presented at the symposium has been jointly published in a thematic issue of the International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance, 5(2).     

A LIMIT OF BILATERAL CONTRACTING INSTITUTIONS

Nonconvexities undermine the efficiency of the usually robust "double auction" or DA market institution. We experimentally examine two modified DAs that allow for particularly rich bilateral contracting such as arbitrarily nonlinear pricing. The first allows for arbitrarily nonlinear pricing but should not necessarily promote it; the second should promote efficient nonlinear pricing. Experiments support predictions on the emergence of nonlinear pricing, but not those concerning efficiency. Coordination problems are the culprit. We conclude that institutions capable of dealing with some nonconvexities must frequently provide multilateral contracting possibilities not permitted by DA rules and other market-like bilateral contracting institutions. (JEL C92 , D49 , L19 )     

Living through exposure to toxic psychiatric orthodoxies: exploring narratives of people with 'mental health problems' who are looking for employment on the open labour market

This article explores lived experiences and insights of five people with long-term 'mental health problems', focusing on their search for employment in a disabling society. In our qualitative, inductive analysis we investigate why it seems almost impossible to attain a status as respected adult workers. We present five central findings: (1) losing the game before it starts; (2) internalizing the vicious circle of victim blaming; (3) from control overload to a life with inadequate supports; (4) from crushed dreams back to passive inactivity; (5) signs of resilience and resistance. In meaningful dialogue survivors give voice to alternative and plural epistemological grounds of life with 'madness'. In our concluding reflections we argue that psychiatric discourses, what we term toxic psychiatric orthodoxies, silence, disable and construct survivors as unemployable.     

The More Things Change the More They Stay the Same: Mexican Naturalization before and after Welfare Reform1

During the last decade there has been a dramatic increase in the both the number and the rate of Mexican naturalization. Some have interpreted this increase as a response to changes in welfare and immigration policy surrounding the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), which limited public assistance to non‐citizens, and the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), which may have increased the incentive to naturalize by making it more difficult for legal immigrants to sponsor their relatives for entry to the United States. This article uses Current Population Survey data from 1994/95 and 2000/01 to examine how the social and economic determinants of naturalization may have changed in order to provide insight into which explanation for the increase in naturalizations is most relevant. We find that while the proportion of Mexican immigrants who are naturalized increased during the 1990s, their determinants have remained largely the same with the exception that those with noncitizen spouses have become more likely to be naturalized in the post‐reform period. This suggests that a more cautious interpretation be taken about the relationship between the increase in naturalizations and welfare and sponsorship restrictions, particularly when regarding Mexican immigrants.     

Estimating the reliability of repeatedly measured endpoints based on linear mixed‐effects models. A tutorial

There are various settings in which researchers are interested in the assessment of the correlation between repeated measurements that are taken within the same subject (i.e., reliability). For example, the same rating scale may be used to assess the symptom severity of the same patients by multiple physicians, or the same outcome may be measured repeatedly over time in the same patients. Reliability can be estimated in various ways, for example, using the classical Pearson correlation or the intra‐class correlation in clustered data. However, contemporary data often have a complex structure that goes well beyond the restrictive assumptions that are needed with the more conventional methods to estimate reliability. In the current paper, we propose a general and flexible modeling approach that allows for the derivation of reliability estimates, standard errors, and confidence intervals – appropriately taking hierarchies and covariates in the data into account. Our methodology is developed for continuous outcomes together with covariates of an arbitrary type. The methodology is illustrated in a case study, and a Web Appendix is provided which details the computations using the R package CorrMixed and the SAS software. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

“The Day All of the Different Parts of Me Can Come Along”: Intersectionality and U.S. Third World Feminism in the Poetry of Pat Parker and Willyce Kim

This article brings to light the poetry of Pat Parker and Willyce Kim, two key figures within the 1970s and ‘80s women in print movement. While Parker and Kim have been rightly placed within African-American and Asian-American histories, respectively, and working-class and lesbian-feminist literary histories, their work is most fully understood within the context of U.S. Third World Feminism. Through close readings of poetic form and content in addition to engagement with current debates about intersectionality as a methodology, the article links Kim and Parker's works to central contributions of U.S. Third World Feminism such as intersectionality and power across and within difference that continue to influence feminist theory today.     

The discursive construction of gay teenagers in times of mediatization: youth's reflections on intimate storytelling,queer shame and realness in popular social media places

New media applications such as social networking sites are understood as important evolutions for queer youth. These media and communication technologies allow teenagers to transgress their everyday life places and connect with other queer teens. Moreover, social media websites could also be used for real political activism such as publicly sharing coming out videos on YouTube. Despite these increased opportunities for self-reflexive storytelling on digital media platforms, their everyday use and popularity also bring particular complexities in the everyday lives of young people. Talking to 51 youngsters between 13 and 19 years old in focus groups, this paper inquires how young audiences discursively constructed meanings on intimate storytelling practices such as interpreting intimate stories, reflecting on their own and other peers' intimate storytelling practices. Specifically focusing on how they relate to intimate storytelling practices of gay peers, this paper identified particular challenges for queer youth who transgress the heteronormative when being active on popular social media. The increasing mediatization of intimate youth cultures brings challenges for queer teenagers, which relate to authenticity, (self-) surveillance and fear of imagined audiences.