Background: Professional caregivers in youth residential care institutions experience frequent verbal and physical aggression as well as multiple stressors as part of their everyday work, leading to high levels of burnout and staff turnover. Resilience might buffer against psychophysiological stress response and therefore be crucial for well-being in professional caregivers.Objectives: We aimed to investigate if measures related to resilience [sense of coherence (SoC), self-efficacy and self-care] and attachment security of caregivers were cross-sectionally associated with stress markers in hair samples [cortisol and dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA)].Method: Participants (n = 134; 64.2% women) reported on individual resilience measures and provided hair samples for cortisol and DHEA assays. Attachment was assessed in a subsample using the Adult Attachment Projective Picture System (AAP, n = 69). Linear regression models were fitted to estimate the association between resilience measures and the Cortisol:DHEA ratio, cortisol and DHEA, controlling for gender and age.Results: SoC was associated with a lower Cortisol:DHEA ratio (β = −0.36, p < 0.001), driven by a positive association between SoC and DHEA levels (β = 0.28, p = 0.002). Self-care was also associated with lower Cortisol:DHEA ratios (β = −0.24, p = 0.005), due to self-care being associated with higher DHEA (β = 0.21, p = 0.016). HPA-axis measures were not associated with self-efficacy nor with attachment patterns in a subsample.Conclusions: Our findings imply that youth residential care institutions might benefit from programs focusing on enhancing SoC and self-care practices. Fostering a meaningful, comprehensible and manageable professional climate in caregiving environments and implementing self-care in routine practices might enhance not only well-being but also physical health of professional caregivers and in this way buffer adverse health effects of chronic stressors.
Cognitive deficits are common in patients with major depression. The present study investigated whether these impairments also comprise language processes such as sentence comprehension. We studied four language-related evoked potentials (early left anterior negativity [ELAN], N400, left anterior negativity [LAN], and P600) in 14 patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) in partial remission and 14 matched healthy controls using a sentence paradigm with correct, semantic mismatching, and syntactic mismatching sentences. In contrast to controls, patients showed no significant P600 effect when comparing syntactic mismatching and correct sentences. No group differences could be observed for the ELAN, N400, and LAN components. The missing P600 effect may indicate deficits in the cognitive domain of language processing in depressive patients or impairment of a more general process to detect deviances from regularities. How this result integrates into the concept of a general cognitive deficit in major depression remains a goal for future studies.
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