Purpose Facing the COVID-19 pandemic, police officers are confronted with various novel challenges, which might place additional strain on officers. This mixed-method study investigated officers' strain over three months after the lockdown. Methods In an online survey, 2567 police officers (77% male) from Austria, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Spain participated at three measurement points per country in spring, 2020. Three-level growth curve models assessed changes in strain and its relation to stressor appraisal, emotion regulation, and preparedness through training. To add context to the findings, free response answers about officers' main tasks, stressors, and crisis measures were coded inductively. Results On average, officers seemed to tolerate the pandemic with slight decreases in strain over time. Despite substantial variance between countries, 66% of the variance occurred between individuals. Sex, work experience, stressor appraisal, emotion regulation, and preparedness significantly predicted strain. Risk of infection and deficient communication emerged as main stressors. Officers' reports allowed to derive implications for governmental, organizational, and individual coping strategies during pandemics. Conclusion Preparing for a pandemic requires three primary paths: 1) enacting unambiguous laws and increasing public compliance through media communication, 2) being logistically prepared, and 3) improving stress regulation skills in police training.

Background Physical activity reduces the incidences of noncommunicable diseases, obesity, and mortality, but an inactive lifestyle is becoming increasingly common. Innovative approaches to monitor and promote physical activity are warranted. While individual monitoring of physical activity aids in the design of effective interventions to enhance physical activity, a basic prerequisite is that the monitoring devices exhibit high validity. Objective Our goal was to assess the validity of monitoring heart rate (HR) and energy expenditure (EE) while sitting or performing light-to-vigorous physical activity with 4 popular wrist-worn wearables (Apple Watch Series 4, Polar Vantage V, Garmin Fenix 5, and Fitbit Versa). Methods While wearing the 4 different wearables, 25 individuals performed 5 minutes each of sitting, walking, and running at different velocities (ie, 1.1 m/s, 1.9 m/s, 2.7 m/s, 3.6 m/s, and 4.1 m/s), as well as intermittent sprints. HR and EE were compared to common criterion measures: Polar-H7 chest belt for HR and indirect calorimetry for EE. Results While monitoring HR at different exercise intensities, the standardized typical errors of the estimates were 0.09-0.62, 0.13-0.88, 0.62-1.24, and 0.47-1.94 for the Apple Watch Series 4, Polar Vantage V, Garmin Fenix 5, and Fitbit Versa, respectively. Depending on exercise intensity, the corresponding coefficients of variation were 0.9%-4.3%, 2.2%-6.7%, 2.9%-9.2%, and 4.1%-19.1%, respectively, for the 4 wearables. While monitoring EE at different exercise intensities, the standardized typical errors of the estimates were 0.34-1.84, 0.32-1.33, 0.46-4.86, and 0.41-1.65 for the Apple Watch Series 4, Polar Vantage V, Garmin Fenix 5, and Fitbit Versa, respectively. Depending on exercise intensity, the corresponding coefficients of variation were 13.5%-27.1%, 16.3%-28.0%, 15.9%-34.5%, and 8.0%-32.3%, respectively. Conclusions The Apple Watch Series 4 provides the highest validity (ie, smallest error rates) when measuring HR while sitting or performing light-to-vigorous physical activity, followed by the Polar Vantage V, Garmin Fenix 5, and Fitbit Versa, in that order. The Apple Watch Series 4 and Polar Vantage V are suitable for valid HR measurements at the intensities tested, but HR data provided by the Garmin Fenix 5 and Fitbit Versa should be interpreted with caution due to higher error rates at certain intensities. None of the 4 wrist-worn wearables should be employed to monitor EE at the intensities and durations tested.

Police officers are often required to perform under high-stress circumstances, in which optimal task performance is crucial for their and the bystanders’ physical integrity. However, stress responses, particularly anxiety and increased cortisol levels, shift attention from goal-directed to stimulus-driven control, leaving police officers with poor shooting performance under stress. Cardiac vagal activity and coping-related traits (i.e., self-control, sensation seeking) might help individuals to maintain performance under stress. So far, only few studies have integrated coping-related traits, psychophysiological stress markers and occupationally meaningful measures of behavior to investigate police officers’ work performance under stress. Therefore, the present study investigated 19 police recruits ( M age = 22.84, SD = 3.30) undergoing a reality-based shooting scenario in two experimental conditions in a within-design: low stress (LS) against a non-threatening mannequin, and high stress (HS), involving physical threat by an opponent. Psychological (i.e., anxiety, mental effort) and physiological stress responses (i.e., salivary cortisol, alpha-amylase, cardiac vagal activity) as well as shooting accuracy were repeatedly assessed. It was hypothesized that under stress, police recruits would demonstrate elevated psychophysiological stress responses and impaired shooting performance. Elevated psychophysiological stress responses would negatively influence shooting performance, whereas self-control, sensation seeking and cardiac vagal activity would positively influence shooting performance. While recruits reported significantly higher anxiety and mental effort in the HS scenario, both scenarios elicited comparable physiological responses. Overall, shooting accuracy was low and did not significantly decrease in the HS scenario. Shooting performance was predicted by self-control in the LS scenario and by post-task cardiac vagal activity in the HS scenario. While increased anxiety hints at a successful stress manipulation, physiological responses suggest similar stress levels for both scenarios, diminishing potential behavioral differences between the scenarios. Performance efficiency decreased under stress, as indicated by increasing mental effort. Findings on self-control suggest that suppressing negative stress responses might lead to impaired goal-directed attention, resulting in performance decrements. For police research and training, high-realism scenarios afford an opportunity to investigate and experience psychophysiological stress responses.

Background The COVID-19 pandemic has exerted great pressure on national health systems, which have aimed to ensure comprehensive healthcare at all times. Healthcare professionals working with COVID-19 patients are on the frontline and thereby confronted with enormous demands. Although early reports exist on the psychological impact of the pandemic on frontline medical staff working in Asia, little is known about its impact on healthcare professionals in other countries and across various work sectors. The present cross-sectional, online survey sought to investigate common work stressors among healthcare professionals, their psychological stress as well as coping resources during the pandemic. Methods A sample of 575 healthcare professionals (57% male) in three different sectors (hospital, prehospital emergency care, and outpatient service) reported their experiences concerning work and private stressors, psychological stress, and coping strategies between April 17, 2020 and June 5, 2020. To capture pandemic-specific answers, most of the items were adapted or newly developed. Exploratory factor analyses (EFA) were conducted to detect underlying latent factors relating to COVID-specific work stressors. In a next step, the effects of these latent stressors across various work sectors on psychological stress (perceived stress, fatigue, and mood) were examined by means of structural equation models (SEM). To add lived experience to the findings, responses to open-ended questions about healthcare professionals’ stressors, effective crisis measures and prevention, and individual coping strategies were coded inductively, and emergent themes were identified. Results The EFA revealed that the examined work stressors can be grouped into four latent factors: “fear of transmission”, “interference of workload with private life”, “uncertainty/lack of knowledge”, and “concerns about the team”. The SEM results showed that “interference of workload with private life” represented the pivotal predictor of psychological stress. “Concerns about the team” had stress-reducing effects. The latent stressors had an equal effect on psychological stress across work sectors. On average, psychological stress levels were moderate, yet differed significantly between sectors (all p < .001); the outpatient group experienced reduced calmness and more stress than the other two sectors, while the prehospital group reported lower fatigue than the other two sectors. The prehospital group reported significantly higher concerns about the team than the hospital group (p < .001). In their reports, healthcare professionals highlighted regulations such as social distancing and the use of compulsory masks, training, experience and knowledge exchange, and social support as effective coping strategies during the pandemic. The hospital group mainly mentioned organizational measures such as visiting bans as effective crisis measures, whereas the prehospital sector most frequently named governmental measures such as contact restrictions. Conclusion The study demonstrated the need for sector-specific crisis measures to effectively address the specific work stressors faced by the outpatient sector in particular. The results on pandemic-specific work stressors reveal that healthcare professionals might benefit from coping strategies that facilitate the utilization of social support. At the workplace, team commitment and knowledge exchange might buffer against adverse psychological stress responses. Schedules during pandemics should give healthcare workers the opportunity to interact with families and friends in ways that facilitate social support outside work. Future studies should investigate cross-sector stressors using a longitudinal design to identify both sector- and time-specific measures. Ultimately, an international comparison of stressors and measures in different sectors of healthcare systems is desirable.

Individuals seem to react physiologically differently to a sport-specific stressor, depending on their level of sensation seeking. HSS seem to be less strained, and seem to perform better. These findings might be relevant not only for the evaluation of (sport-) psychological interventions but also for other contexts (e.g., special forces).

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Despite the study limitations, these results suggest that mental practice may be useful in preventing loss of hand function associated with mid-term immobilization. Because of the expected clinical benefits, the low cost and simple application of the intervention, the effects of mental practice in orthopedic rehabilitation of the upper extremity warrant further study.

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