Exploring implicit preventive strategies in prehospital emergency workers: a novel approach for preventing back problems.

Introduction: Back problems are a major occupational health issue for prehospital emergency care professionals. The goals of this article are to: 1) provide descriptive data about the prevalence and the severity of lower back and upper back disorders in EMTs and paramedics; 2) identify some individual and collective strategies used by EMTs and paramedics to protect their health as they perform prehospital emergency missions; 3) assess the possible effectiveness of strategies in preventing back problems by exploring associations between the use of strategies and the presence and severity of symptoms.

Material And Methods: The method includes a questionnaire survey (sample n = 334; paramedics and emergency medical technicians) and ergonomics work practice analysis involving shadowing ambulance crews in 12 medical emergency services (over 400 h).

Hyperventilation in anticipatory music performance anxiety.

Objectives And Methods: Self-report studies have shown an association between music performance anxiety (MPA) and hyperventilation complaints. However, hyperventilation was never assessed physiologically in MPA. This study investigated the self-reported affective experience, self-reported physiological symptoms, and cardiorespiratory variables including partial pressure of end-tidal CO(2) (Petco(2)), which is an indicator for hyperventilation, in 67 music students before a private and a public performance.

Effort, reward and self-reported mental health: a simulation study on negative affectivity bias.

Background: In the present article, we propose an alternative method for dealing with negative affectivity (NA) biases in research, while investigating the association between a deleterious psychosocial environment at work and poor mental health. First, we investigated how strong NA must be to cause an observed correlation between the independent and dependent variables. Second, we subjectively assessed whether NA can have a large enough impact on a large enough number of subjects to invalidate the observed correlations between dependent and independent variables.

Multi-level modeling of aspects associated with poor mental health in a sample of prehospital emergency professionals.

Background: The goal of this paper is to investigate the respective influence of work characteristics, the effort-reward ratio, and overcommitment on the poor mental health of out-of-hospital care providers.

Methods: 333 out-of-hospital care providers answered a questionnaire that included queries on mental health (GHQ-12), demographics, health-related information and work characteristics, questions from the Effort-Reward Imbalance Questionnaire, and items about overcommitment. A two-level multiple regression was performed between mental health (the dependent variable) and the effort-reward ratio, the overcommitment score, weekly number of interventions, percentage of non-prehospital transport of patients out of total missions, gender, and age.

Hyperventilation complaints in music performance anxiety among classical music students.

Objective: Despite the importance of respiration and hyperventilation in anxiety disorders, research on breathing disturbances associated with hyperventilation is rare in the field of music performance anxiety (MPA, also known as stage fright). The only comparable study in this area reported a positive correlation between negative feelings of MPA and hyperventilation complaints during performance. The goals of this study were (a) to extend these previous findings to the period before performance, (b) to test whether a positive correlation also exists between hyperventilation complaints and the experience of stage fright as a problem, (c) to investigate instrument-specific symptom reporting, and (d) to confirm gender differences in negative feelings of MPA and hyperventilation complaints reported in other studies.

Stage fright: its experience as a problem and coping with it.

Purpose And Method: This questionnaire survey of 190 university music students assessed negative feelings of music performance anxiety (MPA) before performing, the experience of stage fright as a problem, and how closely they are associated with each other. The study further investigated whether the experience of stage fright as a problem and negative feelings of MPA predict the coping behavior of the music students. Rarely addressed coping issues were assessed, i.

Association of work related chronic stressors and psychiatric symptoms in a Swiss sample of police officers; a cross sectional questionnaire study.

Purpose: (1) To identify work related stressors that are associated with psychiatric symptoms in a Swiss sample of policemen and (2) to develop a model for identifying officers at risk for developing mental health problems.

Method: The study design is cross sectional. A total of 354 male police officers answered a questionnaire assessing a wide spectrum of work related stressors.