OBJECTIVES To assess critical incident exposure among prehospital emergency services personnel in the developing world context of South Africa; and to assess associated mental health consequences. METHODS We recruited a representative sample from emergency services in the Western Cape Province, South Africa, to participate in this cross sectional epidemiological study. Questionnaires covered ...

OBJECTIVES First, to examine the rates of Palestinian adolescents' exposure to (i.e., witnessing and experiencing) different patterns of psychological aggression and physical violence in their families of origin; and second, to examine the correlation between this exposure and sociodemographic characteristics, parents' psychological adjustment problems, and family exposure to political stressor...

The Mental Health Action Checklist for a Better Workplace Environment (MHACL) is a tool for a worker participatory approach to improve work environments for worker mental health. The present study investigated the effects of an organizational intervention using the MHACL on reducing job stressors and the psychological distress of workers of a manufacturing enterprise in Japan with a controlled ...

To evaluate the psychometric properties of the Chinese (mainland) version of Job Content Questionnaire (JCQ), this validation study was conducted in university hospitals among 193 men and 581 women health care workers. The Cronbach's alpha coefficients for decision latitude, psychological job demands and social support ranged from 0.56 to 0.82, which indicated that psychological job demands had...

In response to elevated glucocorticoid levels, erythroid progenitors rapidly expand to produce large numbers of young erythrocytes. Previous work demonstrates hematopoietic changes in rodents exposed to various physical and psychological stressors, however, the effects of chronic psychological stress on erythropoiesis has not be delineated. We employed laboratory, clinical and genomic analyses ...

In order to examine the consumption of dietary supplements among urban adults and the impact of psychological stress on supplement use in relation to lifestyle, 375 interviews of a population-based sample of urban Japanese in 2002 were analysed. The usage of various supplements, stress process (daily stressors, psychological moderators, stress outcomes), personal health practices (smoking, alco...

Chronic orchialgia is a challenging problem to both the practitioner and unhappy patient and may be a poorly understood manifestation of a potential variety of different discrete causes. Treatment options can be wide ranging and include conservative measures, medical therapy, in office treatments and surgical procedures. Research has primarily focused on these more concrete treatment options wi...

OBJECTIVE To examine the psychosocial stressors experienced by fathers of children diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. METHODS Thirty-one fathers whose children (ages 6 to 19) were participating in pediatric HIV clinical trials completed self-report measures of parenting stress, psychological distress, and need for psychosocial services. RESULTS Over half of this sample experienced significantly eleva...

The purpose of this study was to investigate trajectories of psychological distress among low-income, primarily unmarried and African American women who survived Hurricane Katrina (N = 386). Data were collected in the year prior to the hurricane as well as approximately 1 and 3 years thereafter. Using Latent Class Growth Analysis (LCGA), we detected 6 distinct trajectory groups. Over half of th...

Activation of the stress response evokes a cascade of physiological reactions that may be detrimental when repeated or chronic, and when triggered after exposure to psychological/emotional stressors. Investigation of the physiological mechanisms responsible for the health damaging effects requires animal paradigms that repeatedly evoke a response to psychological/emotional stressors. To this en...