Recurrent On-Duty Sleepiness and Alertness Management Strategies in Long-Haul Airline Pilots.

Introduction: We examined whether long-haul airline pilots without recurrent on-duty sleepiness obtain more prior sleep and use more effective in-flight alertness management strategies than their colleagues with recurrent on-duty sleepiness.

Methods: There were 51 pilots who flew at least twice from Helsinki to Asia. Of them, 44 flew at least twice back to Helsinki following 1 local night.

Shifting of attentional set is inadequate in severe burnout: Evidence from an event-related potential study.

Individuals with prolonged occupational stress often report difficulties in concentration. Work tasks often require the ability to switch back and forth between different contexts. Here, we studied the association between job burnout and task switching by recording event-related potentials (ERPs) time-locked to stimulus onset during a task with simultaneous cue-target presentation and unpredictable switches in the task.

Job burnout is associated with dysfunctions in brain mechanisms of voluntary and involuntary attention.

Individuals with job burnout symptoms often report having cognitive difficulties, but related electrophysiological studies are scarce. We assessed the impact of burnout on performing a visual task with varying memory loads, and on involuntary attention switch to distractor sounds using scalp recordings of event-related potentials (ERPs). Task performance was comparable between burnout and control groups.

Alterations in attention capture to auditory emotional stimuli in job burnout: an event-related potential study.

Job burnout is a significant cause of work absenteeism. Evidence from behavioral studies and patient reports suggests that job burnout is associated with impairments of attention and decreased working capacity, and it has overlapping elements with depression, anxiety and sleep disturbances. Here, we examined the electrophysiological correlates of automatic sound change detection and involuntary attention allocation in job burnout using scalp recordings of event-related potentials (ERP).

Fast determination of MMN and P3a responses to linguistically and emotionally relevant changes in pseudoword stimuli.

We developed a new multi-feature mismatch negativity (MMN) paradigm with two improvements: Firstly, the standard tone, a pseudoword /ta-ta/ was presented with equal probability to the nine linguistically relevant deviants, reducing the recording time by 45%. Secondly, three rare, emotionally valenced stimuli: happy, angry, and sad utterances of the standard pseudoword were included in the sequence. MMN signals reflecting the perceptual properties of the sounds were observed for all stimuli.