Abstract
Police officers are often required to perform under high-stress circumstances, in which optimal task performance is crucial for their and the bystanders’ physical integrity. However, stress responses, particularly anxiety and increased cortisol levels, shift attention from goal-directed to stimulus-driven control, leaving police officers with poor shooting performance under stress. Cardiac vagal activity and coping-related traits (i.e., self-control, sensation seeking) might help individuals to maintain performance under stress. So far, only few studies have integrated coping-related traits, psychophysiological stress markers and occupationally meaningful measures of behavior to investigate police officers’ work performance under stress. Therefore, the present study investigated 19 police recruits (Mage = 22.84, SD = 3.30) undergoing a reality-based shooting scenario in two experimental conditions in a within-design: low stress (LS) against a non-threatening mannequin, and high stress (HS), involving physical threat by an opponent. Psychological (i.e., anxiety, mental effort) and physiological stress responses (i.e., salivary cortisol, alpha-amylase, cardiac vagal activity) as well as shooting accuracy were repeatedly assessed. It was hypothesized that under stress, police recruits would demonstrate elevated psychophysiological stress responses and impaired shooting performance. Elevated psychophysiological stress responses would negatively influence shooting performance, whereas self-control, sensation seeking and cardiac vagal activity would positively influence shooting performance. While recruits reported significantly higher anxiety and mental effort in the HS scenario, both scenarios elicited comparable physiological responses. Overall, shooting accuracy was low and did not significantly decrease in the HS scenario. Shooting performance was predicted by self-control in the LS scenario and by post-task cardiac vagal activity in the HS scenario. While increased anxiety hints at a successful stress manipulation, physiological responses suggest similar stress levels for both scenarios, diminishing potential behavioral differences between the scenarios. Performance efficiency decreased under stress, as indicated by increasing mental effort. Findings on self-control suggest that suppressing negative stress responses might lead to impaired goal-directed attention, resulting in performance decrements. For police research and training, high-realism scenarios afford an opportunity to investigate and experience psychophysiological stress responses.
Highlights
On duty, police officers often encounter threatening situations which are accompanied by high levels of acute stress (Anderson et al, 2002)
The present study investigated the psychological, physiological and behavioral responses of police recruits during a simulated shooting scenario under a high stress (HS) and a low stress (LS) condition
Police recruits exposed to reality-based shooting scenarios demonstrated greater increases in anxiety and mental effort in response to the HS scenario than the LS scenario
Summary
Police officers often encounter threatening situations which are accompanied by high levels of acute stress (Anderson et al, 2002). Police officers are often required to respond to situations which threaten their physical integrity or psychological well-being, e.g., spotting a stolen vehicle, a high speed chase or conflict with a suspect (Anderson et al, 2002) These critical incidents are sudden, powerful events that are likely to overwhelm the police officers’ coping resources and to be perceived as outside of their immediate control. Critical incidents in police work hold high levels of novelty, uncontrollability and personal as well as others’ threat of injury or death Given these characteristics, the body responds to these external demands by an activation of the fast reacting sympathetic adrenomedullary system (SAM; Nater and Rohleder, 2009) and the slower hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis (McEwen, 1998; Dickerson and Kemeny, 2004). Physiological response patterns were inconsistent across studies, it was found that police officers showed increases in subjective stress, heart rate, sCorti and sAA in response to various simulated police scenarios (Regehr et al, 2008; Taverniers and De Boeck, 2014; Strahler and Ziegert, 2015). Groer et al (2010) compared physiological responses during two virtual reality scenarios of different intensity: the lengthy chase of an armed suspect produced the largest responses in sCorti and sAA, while sAA, but not sCorti was increased during the short chase of a motorcyclist (Groer et al, 2010)
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