Work Addiction and Work Engagement: a Network Approach to Cross-Cultural Data

How does working time impact perceived mental disorders? New insights into the U-shaped relationship

Based on a large-scale nationally representative survey in China, this paper uses the exogenous impact of automation on working hours as the instrumental variable to examine working time's impact on perceived mental disorders, on the basis of dealing with endogeneity. Different from existing literature, it is found that the impact of working time on perceived mental disorders is U-shaped, rather than linear. Mental disorders firstly decrease with working hours. After working more than 48.688 h per week, further increases in working time carry notable mental health costs, leading to a positive relationship between working hours and depression. The turning point of this U-shaped relationship is almost in line with the International Labor Organization's 48 working hours/week standard, justifying it from a mental health perspective. In addition, we further exclude the possibility of more complex nonlinear relationships between working time and perceived mental disorders. Furthermore, heterogeneities are found in the effects of working hours on mental disorders across different subgroups. Males are more depressed when working overtime. Older workers have a lower tolerance for overwork stress. The turning point is smaller for the highly educated group and they are more sensitive to working longer. Those with higher socioeconomic status are less depressed after exceeding the optimal hours of work. The increase in depression among rural workers faced with overwork is not prominent. Perceived mental disorders are lower among immigrants and those with higher health status. In addition, labor protection and social security help to weaken mental disorders caused by overtime work. In conclusion, this paper demonstrates that working time has a U-shaped impact on perceived mental disorders and highlights the vulnerability of certain groups, providing a reference for setting optimal working hours from a mental health perspective.

Problematic overstudying, Big Five personality, and music performance anxiety: associations with well-being and GPA

BACKGROUND

Problematic overstudying is a compulsive and pathological overinvolvement in studying leading to harm and considerable functional impairments. It is conceptualized as "study addiction," a precursor to work addiction. It has been investigated within the addictive behaviours framework in general populations of students for over a decade. A previous study analysed the problem among young musicians as a particularly vulnerable group. It found some important differences in potential personality risk factors among music academy students compared to general populations of students and showed an important role of social anxiety. The current study aimed to validate these findings in a separate larger sample and extend them by investigating the role of music performance anxiety (MPA).

PARTICIPANTS AND PROCEDURE

The study was conducted among 213 students of music academies. Valid and reliable measures of study addiction, MPA, Big Five personality and well-being were used.

RESULTS

The results showed that MPA played a similar role as social anxiety in terms of being a predictor, mediator, and moderator of the main replicated effects supporting the hypothesised mechanisms regulating study addiction. However, extraversion was not associated with study addiction in multiple hierarchical regression analysis, but conscientiousness and neuroticism were. Study addiction was associated with indicators of decreased well-being, above and beyond MPA, and personality.

CONCLUSIONS

These results show that MPA plays an analogous role to social anxiety and that the role of Big Five personality in study addiction among young musicians requires further investigation due to inconsistent findings.

Work addiction, work engagement, job burnout, and perceived stress: A network analysis

Introduction

Recently, the network theory of mental disorders has been used to conceptualize work addiction as a dynamic system of symptoms in direct relationships. This study aimed to extend previous work by investigating the direct relationships of work addiction symptoms with dimensions of work engagement, job burnout, and perceived stress.

Methods

These phenomena were measured with the Bergen Work Addiction Scale, the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale, the Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey, and the Perceived Stress Scale. The sample comprised 676 working Poles with a mean age of 36.12 years (SD = 11.23). The network analysis followed the guidelines for estimating psychological networks from cross-sectional data.

Results

Work engagement and job burnout were more closely associated with each other than with work addiction which supports the notion that engagement and burnout represent polar opposites of the same construct and that work addiction is a separate phenomenon, related to both work engagement and job burnout via specific pathways. The symptoms of work addiction were connected with other phenomena through four direct relationships: (1) mood modification-absorption, (2) mood modification-stress, (3) withdrawal-absorption, and (4) problems-exhaustion.

Discussion

These findings narrow down and specify hypotheses regarding potential mechanisms leading from engagement to addiction and from addiction to burnout. The possible mechanisms focus on the absorption component and mood modification related to efforts focused on alleviating chronic stress and negative emotional states. In turn, problems arising from work addiction may lead to exhaustion. Future studies investigating these mechanisms in detail may enable proper prevention programs and therapeutic interventions.

Network analysis of the relationships between conspiracy beliefs towards COVID-19 vaccine and symptoms of fear of COVID-19 in a sample of latin american countries

The present study examined how conspiracy beliefs about COVID-19 vaccines specifically relate to symptoms of fear of COVID-19 in a sample of four South American countries. A total of 1785 people from Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru participated, responding to a sociodemographic survey, the Fear of COVID-19 scale (FCV-19 S) and the Vaccine Conspiracy Beliefs Scale-COVID-19 (VCBS-COVID-19). Network analysis identified the most important symptoms of fear and conspiracy beliefs about COVID-19 vaccines (nodes) and the associations between them (edges). In addition, the robustness of the network of these indicators of centrality and the possible differences in the structure and connectivity of the networks between the four countries were evaluated. The results suggest that the nodes with the highest centrality were items 2 and 5 of the FCV-19 S and item 2 of the VCBS-COVID-19. Likewise, item 6 is the belief that most predicts conspiracy beliefs about vaccines against COVID-19; while item 6 was the symptom that most predicts fear of COVID-19. The findings strongly support cross-cultural similarities in the networks across the four countries rather than differences. Although it was expected that a higher presence of symptoms of fear of COVID-19 may lead people to compensate for their fear by believing in conspiratorial ideas about vaccines and, consequently, rejecting the COVID-19 vaccine, the results do not clearly show this relationship. This could lead other researchers to generate evidence to explain the differences between Latin American countries and countries in other contexts in terms of vaccination rates. This evidence could be useful to develop policies favoring vaccination against COVID-19 that are more contextualized to the Latin American region, characterized by social instability and economic recession during the pandemic.