Psychological Health and Overweight and Obesity Among High Stressed Work Environments

Abstract

Correctional employees are recognized to underreport stress and stress symptoms and are known to have a culture that discourages appearing “weak” and seeking psychiatric help. This study assesses underreporting of stress and emotions. Additionally, it evaluates the relationships between stress and emotions on health behaviors. Correctional employees (n=317) completed physical assessments to measure body mass index (BMI), and surveys to assess perceived stress, emotions, and health behavior (diet, exercise, and sleep quality). Stress and emotion survey items were evaluated for under-reporting via skewness, kurtosis, and visual assessment of histograms. Structural equation modeling evaluated relationships between stress/emotion and health behaviors. Responses to stress and negatively worded emotions were non-normally distributed whereas responses to positively-worded emotions were normally distributed. Emotion predicted diet, exercise, and sleep quality whereas stress predicted only sleep quality. As stress was a poor predictor of health behaviors and responses to stress and negatively worded emotions were non-normally distributed it may suggests correctional employees are under-reporting stress and negative emotions.

Factors attributing to obesity among working adults in Egypt

“…An exception was detected for CRP and DHEA-S that could be related to other factors among the study sample than stress. Similar findings were reported by some research studies (Faghri et al, 2015;Pollard et al, et al1995;Griffin et a., 1993) that emphasized disconnection between dietary behaviours inviting obesity and stress. The level of cortisol among the study sample, being at the normal level, also favoured exclusion of the assumption that increased BMI was due to the lipogenic effect of increased secretion of cortisol in response to the prevalence of stress.…”