Is Humor the Best Medicine? The Buffering Effect of Coping Humor on Traumatic Stressors in Firefighters

Details

• Personal Author:
  Kale A ; Sliter M ; Yuan Z
• Description:
  Although our understanding of workplace stressors has grown across the past 30 years, this research has generally ignored traumatic workplace stressors. This is a serious omission, given that many occupations (e.g., firefighters, emergency medical technicians, and police) are frequently exposed to traumatic stressors. As such, the first purpose of the current study was to examine the impact of exposure to traumatic stressors in firefighters. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), burnout, and absenteeism were investigated as cognitive, affective, and behavioral outcomes. Additionally, we sought to investigate coping humor as a mechanism for dealing with traumatic stressors. We frame these expectations by discussing humor from a transactional theory of emotion/coping perspective, as well as through humor's social bonding feature and its ability to combat the physiological impact of stressors. We surveyed 179 firefighters at two time points on relevant variables, with dependent variables collected at Time 2. The results indicated that traumatic events significantly predicted burnout, PTSD, and absenteeism and that coping humor buffered this relationship for burnout and PTSD. We discuss the implications of these findings and call for more research investigating occupations in which traumatic stressors are a concern, as well as for more integration of humor into the workplace literature [Description provided by NIOSH]
• Subjects:
  • Absenteeism
  • Behavior
  • Emergency Responders
  • Firefighters
  • Law Enforcement
  • Nervous System
  • Occupational Health
  • Safety
  • Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic
  • Workplace
• Keywords:
  • Workers
  • Work environment
  • Traumatic incident stress
  • Fire fighters
  • Emergency responders
  • Police officers
  • PTSD
  • Post-traumatic stress disorder
  • Absenteeism
  • Cognitive function
  More +
• ISSN:
  0894-3796
• Document Type:
  Text
• Funding:
  Grant
• Genre:
  Journal Article
• Place as Subject:
  Ohio ; OSHA Region 5
• CIO:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)
• Topic:
  Workplace Safety & Health
• Location:
  North America
• Pages in Document:
  257-272
• Volume:
  35
• Issue:
  2
• NIOSHTIC Number:
  nn:20050091
• Citation:
  J Organ Behav 2014 Feb; 35(2):257-272
• Contact Point Address:
  Michael Sliter, Department of Psychology, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, 402N. Blackford St., LD126P, Indianapolis, Indiana 46202, U.S.A
• Email:
  msliter@iupui.edu
• Federal Fiscal Year:
  2014
• Performing Organization:
  University of Cincinnati
• Peer Reviewed:
  True
• Start Date:
  20050701
• Source Full Name:
  Journal of Organizational Behavior
• End Date:
  20260630
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/210591/cdc_210591_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 239.41 KB]
• Collection(s):
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:eba11b79f1580f794c4dd58acbf7fac95aa94e2dffee043ce969e07fb1d46bc4e1a341c1a20667f76074d0182d95e7bd86d5b15ffa14179043fb01e5c86ccf6c