Resilient, cohesive communities are important contributors to the health and well-being of their residents (Ehsan, Klaas, Bastianen, & Spini, 2019). Advances in social psychology suggest a multitude of physical and mental health outcomes derive from meaningful belonging in social groups within a range of contexts (Haslam,

We tested brain and behavioral responses to two common messaging alerts (Outlook and Android whistle) using an oddball paradigm, where participants had to detect the two alerts among a background of white noise and occasional matched, distractor stimuli. Twenty-nine participants were tested using a behavioral target detection task and a subset of 14 were tested both with event-related potential (ERP) and behavioral oddball detection. For the ERP recordings, participants were instructed to attend to a distractor DVD in one condition and in the other, to actively attend to the stimuli. We measured mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3a components and questionnaire responses to job involvement, rumination and work-life balance. There were significantly larger MMN responses to target alert signals, but only in the ignore condition. In both ignore and attend conditions, MMN was larger for the Android stimuli, probably as a result of the larger physical discriminability for the Android tone. On the other hand, there was a significant P3a for Outlook tones, but not for Android tones in the ignore condition. Neither alert showed significant P3a activity within the attend condition, but instead later frontal positivity, which was larger for the Outlook alert (in comparison to its matched distractor) and this effect was not seen for the Android tones. This was despite the Outlook alert being less perceptually discriminable compared to the Android alert. These findings suggest that the indices of attentional processing are more affected by the significance of the alert than the physical qualities. These effects were coupled with the finding that the faster reaction times to the Outlook sounds were correlated with greater job involvement. These data suggest that work-related messages might signal greater attentional switch and effort which in turn may feed into greater job involvement.

Within the social work profession, resilience is integrated into educational programmes, professional development courses and frameworks. Such prevalence reflects the importance of resiliency for the profession. This may be the case in particular for those newer to the profession, where the challenges of managing the adversity synonymous with the social work role are still new, despite an increasing level of responsibility. This study focuses on early career social workers, an important but underexplored career stage within this occupation.The aim of which was to enhance understanding of how resilience is experienced by those who are in a unique transitional period in their careers; no longer students, whilst also not yet experienced social workers. The experiences of resilience for this group was explored through semi-structured interviews with fourteen social workers, all employed within Local Authorities in England. Through thematic analysis, three themes were identified: support, team dynamics, and maintaining professionalism. The findings offer important insights, which can inform and contribute to the supportive environments organisations can foster. As such, the practical implications of the research focus on fostering an environment of positivity, through more guided group supervision and the physical positioning of early career workers within office spaces.

COVID‐19 produced the largest mass mobilisation of collective helping in a generation. Currently, the impact of this voluntary activity is not well understood, particularly for specific groups of volunteers (e.g., new vs. existing) and for different amounts of voluntary activity. Drawing on social psychological work on collective helping, and work from the Social Identity Approach to Health, we seek to address this gap through an analysis of survey data from 1,001 adults living in the south of England (333 men; 646 women; age range = 16–85) during the first UK lockdown. Measures included time spent volunteering pre‐/post‐COVID, community identification, subjective wellbeing, and volunteering intentions. Those who volunteered during COVID‐19 reported higher levels of community identification than those who did not. However, subjective wellbeing benefits were only found for those volunteers who maintained the same level of volunteering (in terms of time) pre‐and post‐COVID lockdown. New volunteers showed significantly lower levels of wellbeing when they were undertaking 5 or more hours of volunteering a week. Our findings provide unique insight into the variable relationship with wellbeing for different groups of volunteers, as well as how the experiences and functioning of ‘crisis’ volunteering are different from volunteering during ‘normal’ times.

Difficulty managing the demands of work and nonwork roles (often referred to in terms of managing balance) can be detrimental to psychological wellbeing and contribute to occupational burnout. The current study investigated the neural correlates of perceived satisfaction with this balance using both trait and state EEG alpha measures. EEG was recorded from 14 participants in full time employment (12 females, aged 35.1 ± 10.1 years) during a resting state and performance of an auditory oddball task; e-mail and messaging alert sounds were used as target stimuli. It was predicted that dissatisfaction with the balance between work and nonwork roles would be associated with increased resting alpha power, consistent with studies of burnout, and diminished alpha response to oddball distractors, consistent with difficulty suppressing automatic responses to work-related stimuli. Significant correlations between self-reported measures of work/nonwork balance and both resting, and task-related alpha responses, supported our predictions. Furthermore, an exploratory partial correlation between work/nonwork balance and resting EEG, controlling for task-related alpha response, suggested that the three variables were interrelated. We propose that dissatisfaction with work/nonwork balance is associated with a state hypervigilance to workrelated cues, and a trait neural marker of fatigue, both symptomatic of lowered cognitive capacity.