Abstract
The substantial body of research employing subjective measures indicates that burnout syndrome is associated with cognitive and emotional dysfunctions. The growing amount of neurophysiological and neuroimaging research helps in broadening existing knowledge of the neural mechanisms underlying core burnout components (emotional exhaustion and depersonalization/cynicism) that are inextricably associated with emotional processing. In the presented EEG study, a group of 93 participants (55 women; mean age = 35.8) were selected for the burnout group or the demographically matched control group on the basis of the results of the Maslach Burnout Inventory – General Survey (MBI-GS) and the Areas of Worklife Survey (AWS). Subjects then participated in an EEG experiment using two experimental procedures: a facial recognition task and viewing of passive pictures. The study focuses on analyzing event-related potentials (ERPs): N170, VPP, EPN, and LPP, as indicators of emotional information processing. Our results show that burnout subjects, as compared to the control group, demonstrate significantly weaker response to affect-evoking stimuli, indexed by a decline in VPP amplitude to emotional faces and decreased EPN amplitude in processing emotional scenes. The analysis of N170 and LPP showed no significant between-group difference. The correlation analyses revealed that VPP and EPN, which are ERP components related to emotional processing, are associated with two core burnout symptoms: emotional exhaustion and cynicism. To our knowledge, we are one of the first research groups to use ERPs to demonstrate such a relationship between neurophysiological activity and burnout syndrome in the context of emotional processing. Thus, in conclusion we emphasized that the decreased amplitude of VPP and EPN components in the burnout group may be a neurophysiological manifestation of emotional blunting and may be considered as neurophysiological markers of emotional exhaustion and cynicism. Additionally, we did not observe a decrease in LPP, which may be considered as a marker that significantly differentiates burnout from depression.
Highlights
Studies on burnout syndrome depict the typical characteristics and consequences of long-term work-related stress
Sabatinelli et al (2013) analyzed the associations between early and late event-related potentials (ERPs) using functional MRI signals of cortical and subcortical brain areas. They found that emotional modulation of the late positive potential (LPP) correlates with subcortical and visual cortical activation; emotional modulation of the early posterior negativity (EPN) only correlates with subcortical and corticolimbic brain areas. These findings suggest that EPN may refer to motivational relevance, while LPP refers to emotional discrimination
In all the performed analyses, faces with positive and negative facial expressions were placed in one category called “emotional faces”; instead of four stimulus types, we operated on three separate categories: neutral, emotional, and distorted
Summary
Studies on burnout syndrome depict the typical characteristics and consequences of long-term work-related stress. The existing studies on burnout analyze the negative effects of long-term work-related stress on individuals’ functioning in terms of the complex emotional and cognitive consequences (e.g., Maslach and Leiter, 1997, 2008; Schaufeli and Greenglass, 2001; Sandström et al, 2005; Van der Linden et al, 2005; Schmidt et al, 2007; Oosterholt et al, 2012, 2014; Deligkaris et al, 2014; Golkar et al, 2014). Studying the relationship between emotional exhaustion and emotional regulation in burnout subjects, Golkar et al (2014) observed that burnout individuals have impaired ability to downregulate negative emotions, which can lead to an increased susceptibility to depression
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