Kristin Alyssa Horan

Individuals face many barriers to healthy behaviors, including a lack of time. Some research finds that individuals “borrow” from time that could be spent on health to “pay” for demands in other domains of their lives. This study aims to further explore these trade‐offs as they are motivated by a broader set of life domains (assessing conflict across work, family, and school domains) and as they relate to participation in multiple health behaviors (examining sleep, diet, and exercise behaviors). This study also aims to provide insights that could reduce trade‐offs, identifying individual and organizational characteristics that moderate the work‐family‐school conflict and health behavior relationship. Finally, we aim to better understand the decisional and motivational processes influencing trade‐offs by examining the value placed on each health behavior. Seventy‐three employed students completed a daily diary study assessing daily levels of work‐family‐school conflict and behaviors related to sleep, diet, and exercise. Multi‐level modeling revealed a curvilinear relationship between work‐family‐school conflict and exercise and a negative linear relationship between work‐family‐school conflict and sleep. Proactive personality and time management moderated the work‐family‐school conflict and exercise relationship. Coping moderated the relationship between work‐school‐family conflict and daily time spent sleeping. Family supportive supervisor behaviors and workplace health climate moderated the relationship between work‐family‐school conflict and exercise. A latent profile analysis revealed differences in value placed on various health behaviors, and these value profiles moderated the relationship between work‐family‐school conflict and exercise. These results shed light on the trade‐offs that may take place for busy individuals when time is scarce and provide insights that could be useful in promoting valuable health behaviors.

Participation is an essential component in workplace health and safety programs or interventions. While those who conduct interventions often report participation rates among the overall organization, it could be useful to compare participants to industry statistics, given that health and safety risks can diverge widely among industries. Research students from Kennesaw State University analyzed a sample of published papers that focus on occupational health psychology interventions. This narrative review analyzed existing studies to look for similarities or dissimilarities between a sample of intervention participants and employees of their industry as a whole. The students considered demographic, socioeconomic, job-related, and health-related characteristics. Incomplete reporting of sample characteristics was found to be common among the articles coded but was most common for demographic characteristics (comparison was possible in approximately 86% of samples). Samples tended to be similar to industry characteristics in age (65% coded as similar when comparison was possible), dissimilar in terms of gender, with trends of male and female overrepresentation both being common (42% and 38%, respectively when a comparison was possible) and dissimilar in terms of race, which samples being more White/Caucasian than the industry as a whole (66% when a comparison was possible). The findings of this study could encourage more complete reporting norms when describing the samples of workplace interventions, benefiting both research and practice.

Introduction: Military service members are at risk of heat stroke, particularly due to physical exertion during training and tasks. Due to the serious nature and potentially fatal consequences of heat stroke, it is important to understand trends over time and among subgroups of service members in diagnoses of heat stroke. We aimed to replicate and extend recent work by Williams and Oh1 by examining the incidence of heat stroke in military service members from 2016 to 2021 and performing subgroup comparisons for sex, age, race, marital status, pay grade, and service branch. Materials and Methods: Data were obtained from the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED). Incidence rates were calculated per 10,000 between 2016 and 2021. Single-sample chi-square analyses were used to examine trends related to heat stroke in subgroups relative to their group’s population density within the military. Results: Findings revealed that incidence rates for heat strokes declined by 5.46% in the study period. The total number of heat stroke cases between 2016 and 2021 was 2,295. Single sample chi-square analyses revealed overrepresentation in heat stroke diagnoses for male, younger, un-married, and White service members, for those in the Army and Marine Corps, and for those in junior paygrades, compared to what would be expected based on their population density within the military. Conclusion: Incidence rates of heat stroke among military service members declined from 2016 to 2021. Subgroups overrepresented in incidence rates likely reflect differences in training, tasks, and supervision. These results highlight the importance of ongoing attention to policies designed to prevent, recognize, and properly treat heat stroke in military settings.

The present study advances research on the negative consequences of precarious work experiences (PWE), which include perceptions of threats to one's job and financial security as well as a sense of powerlessness and inability to exercise rights in the workplace. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a backdrop, we examine how PWE relate to sickness presenteeism and worry about work-related COVID-19 exposure. In a 12-week, four-wave study of workers working fully in-person, perceptions of powerlessness and job insecurity were associated with presenteeism (e.g., general presenteeism as well as attending work with known or possible COVID-19 infection) and concerns about disease exposure at work. Whereas powerlessness primarily operated at the between-person level of analysis, job insecurity's effects emerged at both levels of analysis. A sense of powerlessness at work also predicted sending children to school/daycare sick. In sum, the findings suggest that precarity related to being able to keep one's job and a sense of powerlessness at work contribute to concerns about the risk of COVID-19 exposure at work and, simultaneously, behaviors that may contribute to the health risks faced by others. This research provides added support to the argument that precarious work should be addressed in order to improve both worker well-being and public health. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Introduction: It is important to understand the behavioral and occupational health needs of military police personnel, a high-risk and understudied population. Materials and Methods: The incidence rates of behavioral and occupational conditions were examined from the years of 2005 to 2021 from the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database. Single-sample chi-square analyses were performed to analyze the differences in the incidence rates across demographic groups relative to population density. Results: There were moderate-to-large increases in sleep-related disorders and mood or stress-related disorders. There were also patterns of overrepresentation or underrepresentation in diagnoses of various conditions by sex, age group, marital status, race, service branch, and pay grade. Conclusions: It is important to provide tailored resources and programming to employees in high-stress settings to help prevent or manage behavioral and occupational health conditions and reduce the stigma surrounding the utilization of such resources and programs.

Complex disaster situations like the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) create macro-level contexts of severe uncertainty that disrupt industries across the globe in unprecedented ways. While occupational health research has made important advances in understanding the effects of occupational stressors on employee well-being, there is a need to better understand the employee well-being implications of severe uncertainty stemming from macro-level disruption. We draw from the Generalized Unsafety Theory of Stress (GUTS) to explain how a context of severe uncertainty can create signals of economic and health unsafety at the industry level, leading to emotional exhaustion through paths of economic and health anxiety. We integrate recent disaster scholarship that classifies COVID-19 as a transboundary disaster and use this interdisciplinary perspective to explain how COVID-19 created a context of severe uncertainty from which these effects unfold. To test our proposed model, we pair objective industry data with time-lagged quantitative and qualitative survey responses from 212 employees across industries collected during the height of the initial COVID-19 response in the United States. Structural equation modeling results indicate a significant indirect effect of industry COVID-19 unsafety signals on emotional exhaustion through the health, but not economic, unsafety path. Qualitative analyses provide further insights into these dynamics. Theoretical and practical implications for employee well-being in a context of severe uncertainty are discussed.

Employees face many demands throughout the workday. Participating in activities can help employees recover from the pressures of work, and physical activity and time spent in nature are among the most beneficial. Simulations of nature offer some of the benefits of actual contact with nature and can address some of the barriers to exercising outdoors that some employees may face. In this pilot study, we examine the influence of physical activity and virtual or actual nature contact on affect, boredom, and satisfaction when experienced during a break from a demanding work task. Twenty-five employed adults participated in an online study in which they completed a problem-solving task, completed a twenty-minute break, and then completed another session of the problem-solving task. During the break, participants were randomized to either a control condition, a physical activity and low-fidelity virtual nature contact condition, a physical activity and high-fidelity virtual nature contact condition, or a physical activity and actual nature contact condition. An examination of the means of affect, boredom, and satisfaction before, during, and after the break revealed that those in high-fidelity virtual nature and actual nature contact conditions seemed to report more positive well-being during the break. The results highlight that to help employees recover from work demands, it could be important to take breaks, be physically active, and have contact with nature, which should be simulated in high fidelity if actual nature contact cannot be achieved.

As a historically stigmatized group, essential service workers on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly became known as ‘heroes’ by an appreciative society. The purpose of this qualitative study was to interpret the valorization of essential service workers through a Deonance Theory perspective. Findings revealed nuances in simultaneous competing and complimenting behavioural motivations among members of society. Theoretical implications include the interpretation of Deonance Theory at the societal level, which extends applications beyond the prediction of behavioural motivations at the individual level.