The "Managed" or Damaged Heart? Emotional Labor, Gender, and Posttraumatic Stressors Predict Workplace Event-Related Acute Changes in Cortisol, Oxytocin, and Heart Rate Variability.

Arija Birze,Gillian Einstein,Elise Paradis,Vicki LeBlanc,Cheryl Regehr

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00604

Abstract

Vital to the everyday operation of police services, police communicators (911 call-takers and dispatchers) are persistently subject to imminent challenges in the workplace; they must always be prepared to engage and deal with a wide variety of circumstances that provoke various intense emotions and physiological stress responses. Acute changes in cortisol, oxytocin, and heart rate variability are central to adaptive responses in stressful complex social interactions, but they might also be indicative of physiological dysregulation due to long-term psychosocial stress exposures. Thus, we examine acute stress-induced release of peripheral oxytocin and cortisol along with changes in heart rate variability, and how each relates to persistent workplace stressors and symptoms of posttraumatic stress. Findings indicate chronic forms of gendered workplace stress such as emotional labor, gender role stress and, posttraumatic stress each have differential associations with, and predict physiological responses to, acutely stressful events in the workplace. These associations suggest potential mechanisms through which communicators become more vulnerable to developing stress-related disorders such as posttraumatic stress injuries, especially after cumulative traumatic exposures in this context. The results also suggest potential pathways for the biological embedding of stressful gendered workplace experiences.

Highlights

Comprising1 mostly women, police communicators (911 emergency call-takers and dispatchers) are central to the everyday operations of emergency services
At the beginning of these sessions, each participant was outfitted with a Heart rate variability (HRV) monitor and the researcher was prepared to collect additional physiological data should an acutely stressful event occur in real-time, during the session
It should be noted that, while the mean score on the Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R) is 25.57, using the more conservative cut-off of 33, suggested by Creamer et al (2003), resulted in 35% of this sample reporting symptoms of posttraumatic stress (PTS) that met the criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

Summary

Introduction

Comprising mostly women, police communicators (911 emergency call-takers and dispatchers) are central to the everyday operations of emergency services. Police communicators are subject to additional, environment specific stressors such as a close, confined workspace and controlled mobility, concentrated organizational scrutiny, intense focus and prolonged periods of rapidly paced work (Regehr et al, 2013), all of which may be understood as gendered aspects of their work (Acker, 1990, 1999, 2006) The performance of their duties necessitates persistent social interactions with the public and officers in an effort to take control of the interactions and garner, triage, and transmit relevant information for positive outcomes (Regehr et al, 2013). Emotional labor (EL), a well-supported sociological conceptualization of emotionfocused work requirements (Hochschild, 2003), is likely both an important aspect of the work of communicators and a source of chronic occupational stress

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