Biopsychological stress regulation in burnout

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Brigitte M. Kudielka
• Subject Area: Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology ; General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2017 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 390920018

Burnout (BO) is a potential consequence of job-related strain and chronic work stress. Although BO is not an official clinical diagnosis, it is acknowledged as an existing and significant problem by the DGPPN (“Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychiatrie, Psychotherapie und Nervenheilkunde”). The BO-syndrome is predominantly a subjective model of disease and is, thus, open for various effects of (work) overload or vulnerability. Therefore, BO can be ascribed to heterogeneous groups of people. This could explain why until now biopsychological studies failed to show consistent results regarding biopsychological correlates of the BO-phenomenon. The projec pursues the question whether subjects who developed BO symptoms, compared to healthy controls, show altered psychoendocrine and neural stress regulation as well as allostatic load, depending on symptom severity. We select participants based on BO symptoms as well as pathogenesis, verified by self- and other ratings, whereby this procedure is a unique feature of the current project. For this purpose, allostatic load parameters (including hair and blood samples) are collected from participants at intervals of 6 months on two dates (T1 & T3). In addition, we investigate for the first time the neural activation in persons with BO symptoms under acute stress exposure in an fMRI environment (T2).The current project duration is 36 months plus 3 months of corona emergency support. With this renewal proposal of project KU 1401/9-1, we apply for a 6 months extension of the staff appropriations for one PhD student. Owing to the Covid-19 pandemic, laboratories were closed and therefore, data collection was not possible at all or only to a very limited extent in the last 14 months (and enduring). To date, 128 subjects have been recruited and 76 subjects have already fully completed the study. Allostatic load parameters were collected from 104 persons at T1 and 117 participants underwent the fMRI examination (T2). Preliminary results indicate that persons with BO symptoms possibly show a shift in hemostatic balance. Moreover, we were able to successfully establish and publish modifications of the stress protocol as well as a new analytic strategy for ScanSTRESS data (Henze et al., 2020), which are applied in the current project. Under normal conditions, data collection would have been completed until march 2021 as planned in the original schedule. However, due to Covid-19 the completion of data collection will delay until end of 2021/beginning of 2022. As final (biochemical) data analysis and manuscript preparation can only take place after completion of data collection, we would like to request for a 6 months extension of staff funding for one PhD student to (partially) compensate for the laboratory closedown due to Covid-19.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Stefan Wüst