Combat zones can be very stressful for those in the area. Even in the battlefield, military medical personnel are expected to save others, while also staying alive. In this study, half of a sample of deployed military medical warriors (total n = 60) participated in technology-assisted relaxation training. Learning relaxation skills with a video clip of virtual reality relaxing scenes showed a statistically significant impact on the anxiety levels of the Experimental Group.
This study assessed the impact of the activation of U.S. Army reservists after terrorists attacked the United States on September 11, 2001. A total of 263 soldiers completed a survey and participated in focus groups. The model's stressors were deactivation uncertainty, workload, and organizational constraints. The outcomes were well-being and turnover intentions. In general, most stressors did predict the proposed outcomes. That is, with high deactivation uncertainty, workload, or organizational constraints, reservists reported low psychological well-being and high turnover intentions. Commanders and policymakers can use our findings when addressing ways to improve reservists' psychological health and to decrease turnover intentions. Specifically, reservists need more predictability and the needed organizational conditions (i.e., proper workload levels and equipment) while activated and deployed to protect our country.
The ability to perform optimally under pressure is critical across many occupations, including the military, first responders, and competitive sport, and depends on a range of cognitive factors. How common these key performance factors are across application domains remains unclear. The current study sought to integrate existing knowledge in the performance field in the form of a transdisciplinary expert consensus on the cognitive mechanisms that underlie performance under pressure. International experts were recruited from four performance domains (i. Defence; ii. Competitive Sport; iii. Civilian High-stakes; and iv. Performance Neuroscience). Experts rated constructs from the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework (in addition to several expert-suggested constructs) across successive rounds, until all constructs reached consensus for inclusion or were eliminated. Finally, included constructs were ranked for their relative importance. Sixty-eight experts completed the first Delphi round, with 94% of experts retained by the end of the Delphi process. Seven of the ten constructs that reached transdisciplinary consensus came from the Cognitive Systems domain including: 1) Attention; 2) Cognitive Control—Goal Selection, Updating, Representation & Maintenance; 3) Cognitive Control—Performance Monitoring; 4) Cognitive Control—Response Selection & Inhibition/Suppression; 5) Working memory—Flexible Updating; 6) Working memory—Active Maintenance; and 7) Working memory—Interference Control. Other constructs that reached transdisciplinary consensus were Self-knowledge, Arousal, and Shifting (an expert-suggested construct). Our results identify a set of transdisciplinary neuroscience-informed constructs, validated through Delphi consensus. This expert consensus is critical to standardising cognitive assessment and informing mechanism-targeted interventions in the broader field of human performance optimisation.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.