Abstract
BackgroundHealth care workers are often affected by burnout, resulting in reduced personal well-being and professional functioning. Although emotional exhaustion is considered a core component of burnout, little is known about the dynamics of emotions and their relation to burnout. We used network analysis to investigate the correlation between the density of a negative emotion network, a marker for emotional rigidity in person-specific networks, and burnout severity.MethodsUsing an ecological momentary assessment design, the intensity of negative emotions of forty-three health care workers and medical students was assessed five times per day (between 6 am and 8 pm) for 17 days. Burnout symptoms were assessed at the end of the study period with the Maslach Burnout Inventory. Multilevel vector autoregressive models were computed to calculate network density of subject-specific temporal networks. The one-sided correlation between network density and burnout severity was assessed. The study protocol and analytic plan were registered prior to the data collection.ResultsWe found a medium-sized correlation between the negative emotion network density and burnout severity at the end of the study period r(45) = .32, 95% CI = .09–1.0, p = .014).ConclusionsThe strength of the temporal interplay of negative emotions is associated with burnout, highlighting the importance of emotions and emotional exhaustion in reaction to occupational-related distress in health care workers. Moreover, our findings align with previous investigations of emotion network density and impaired psychological functioning, demonstrating the utility of conceptualizing the dynamics of emotions as a network.
Highlights
Health care workers are often affected by burnout, resulting in reduced personal well-being and professional functioning
Given that emotional exhaustion constitutes a core dimension of burnout, it does not come as a surprise that emotions and emotional distress play a key role in many conceptualizations of burnout and its pathogenesis [11, Spiller et al BMC Psychol (2021) 9:170
8 had missing data on burnout severity on the last day and 14 had more than 20% missing Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) data and were excluded from further analysis resulting in a final sample size of 47
Summary
Health care workers are often affected by burnout, resulting in reduced personal well-being and professional functioning. Persistent occupation-related distress, commonly operationalized as burnout, has been common among health care workers long before the pandemic’s beginning [2,3,4]. In individuals affected by burnout, negative emotions tend to change slower and persist longer, indicating a diminished capacity to react to environmental challenges [15, 16]. This persistence of emotions is termed inertia and has been commonly measured using the autocorrelation of an emotion. Besides its association with burnout, inertia of emotions is associated with impaired psychological functioning in general, and with specific psychopathologies such as depression [13, 14]
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