BackgroundThe COVID-19 outbreak imposed an overwhelming workload as well as emotional burdens on Healthcare workers (HCWs). In May 2020, an online survey was administered to HCWs in Italy to assess the pandemic's psychological impact and to investigate possible predictive factors that led to individual differences.MethodsThe psychological experience was measured based on the prevalence of self-reported feelings during the pandemic, including negative and positive emotional states. We analyzed the relationship between factors of gender, age, geographic region, professional role, and operational unit, and the four-point scale used to rate the frequency of each emotional state experienced by performing several multinomial logistic regressions, one for each emotion.ResultsOur findings suggest that more than half of HCWs experienced psychological distress during the first COVID-19 outbreak in Italy. Female and younger respondents, especially those operating in northern Italy experienced more frequently negative emotional states such as irritability, anxiety, loneliness, and insecurity. However, positive feelings, first of all solidarity, were also reported especially by female and older workers. The majority of the negative as well as positive emotional states were experienced almost equally by both doctors and nurses, and independently of the operational unit in which they operated.ConclusionsThis study can be very useful as a contribution to the current literature on the psychological effects of this pandemic on health workers. Moreover, our findings can provide useful information in planning more tailored psychological interventions to support this category of workers in the ongoing and future emergencies.
Personality and cognition are found to be two interrelated concepts and to both have a predictive power on educational and life outcomes. With this study we aimed at evaluating the extent to which personality traits interact with cognition in acquiring cognitive competences during higher education. In a sample of university students at different stages of their career and from different fields of study, we collected Big Five traits, as a measure of personality, and Intelligent Quotient (IQ), as a proxy of cognition. A set of multiple regressions served to explore the relative contribution of IQ and personality traits on the performance on two cognitive competences tests: literacy and numeracy. Results showed that IQ highly modulated numeracy but had a moderate or no impact on literacy while, compared with IQ, personality affects literacy more. In a further explorative analysis, we observed that both the effects of personality and IQ on cognitive competences were modulated by the level of the students' career (freshmen, undergraduates, and bachelor graduates). Different traits, and particularly conscientiousness, increased or decreased their impact on achieved scores depending on the educational level, while IQ lost its effect in undergraduates suggesting that personal dispositions become more influential in advancing the academic carrier. Finally, the field of study resulted to be a predictor of numeracy, but also an important covariate altering the pattern of personality impact.
The aim of this work is to present the state of progress and the main features of the TECO (TEst of COmpetence) project, promoted by the (Italian) National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes with the aim to assess students’ learning outcomes in the higher education contest. The results of the 2017-2018 TECO survey (which involved voluntarily over 12,500 nursing, physiotherapy and medical radiology students), showed that attending a university programme makes a difference in development of some competencies, especially for the disciplinary sphere. The analysis will focus on the connections between the characteristics of the students at the beginning of their study career and the achieved level of tested competences. The return of the test results to the students and study programmes’ coordinators will be presented and discussed, considering their possible uses in a self-assessment perspective. TECO results and the new indicators that will be originated from this project could prove to be reliable tools for university programmes self-assessment, encouraging the use of evidence-based strategies for higher education improvement.
The COVID-19 outbreak imposed an overwhelming workload as well as emotional burdens on healthcare professionals (HCPs). In May 2020, an online survey was administered to HCPs in Italy to assess the pandemic’s psychological impact and to investigate possible predictive factors that led to individual differences. Female and younger respondents, especially those operating in northern Italy experienced more frequently negative emotional states such as irritability, anxiety, loneliness, and insecurity. However, positive feelings, first of all solidarity, were also reported especially by female and older workers. The majority of the negative as well as positive emotional states were experienced almost equally by both doctors and nurses, and independently of the operational unit in which they operated. Our findings can provide useful information in planning more tailored psychological interventions to support this category of workers.
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