Abstract
Burnout patients perform poorer on cognitive tasks than healthy controls. A possible explanation for this decreased performance is a relatively permanent reduced motivation to expend effort. In a previous study, we failed to enhance the performance of burnout patients using a monetary incentive and positive feedback. In an attempt to bypass cognitions about fatigue and performance, we tried to motivate healthy controls and burnout patients implicitly by priming participants with either success or failure prior to task performance. As expected, healthy controls primed with success outperformed healthy controls primed with failure. However, no differential priming effect was observed in burnout patients. This suggests that success priming fails to enhance performance in subjects with burnout.
Highlights
Burnout is a stress-related syndrome characterized by exhaustion, occupational detachment, and reduced personal accomplishment
Motivational interventions do not appear to be effective in improving performance in burnout patients
Whether the performance in burnout patients already tends to be as high as possible or whether burnout patients do not believe that their performance can be improved despite positive feedback and financial rewards
Summary
Burnout is a stress-related syndrome characterized by exhaustion, occupational detachment, and reduced personal accomplishment. Suggest that reduced motivation cannot readily be reversed by motivational interventions, because burnout patients suffer from biochemical changes due to prolonged periods of stress that affect performance over longer periods (months, years) of time (Boksem & Tops, 2008; Frankenhaeuser, 1986; Mommersteeg, Keijsers, Heijnen, Verbraak, & Van Doornen, 2006; Sandström et al, 2005; Van der Linden et al, 2005). Longed periods of time), may be fundamental to long-term fatigue syndromes such as burnout This theory is supported by a study by Van Dam et al (2011): in which they failed to motivate burnout patients by providing fake positive feedback about their performance and by announcing a financial reward for the best performing participants. With regard to burnout patients, we expected that those, primed with success, would perform better than those primed with failure if cognitions about the fatigue-performance relationship played a role in reduced cognitive performance
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