The Role of Moral Distress on Physician Burnout during COVID-19.

The purpose of this study was to explore the role of moral distress on physician burnout during COVID-19. Physicians in the US were interviewed between February and March 2021; 479 responded to our survey. The results indicated that moral distress was a key mediator in explaining the relationship between perceived organizational support, medical specialization, emotional labor, and coping with burnout. Results did not support increased burnout among female physicians, and contracting COVID-19 likewise did not play a role in burnout. Our findings suggest that physician burnout can be mitigated by increasing perceived organizational support; likewise, physicians who engaged in deep emotional labor and problem-focused coping tended to fare better when it came to feelings of moral distress and subsequent burnout.

Justice for the average Joe: the role of envy and the mentalizing network in the deservingness of others' misfortunes.

The misfortunes of enviable individuals are met by observers with pleasure whereas those of "average", non-enviable individuals elicit pain. These responses are mirrored in deservingness judgments, as enviable individuals' misfortunes are perceived as deserved and those of non-enviable individuals perceived as undeserved. However, the neural underpinnings of these deservingness disparities remain unknown. To explore this phenomenon, we utilized fMRI to test the hypotheses that (A) non-enviable targets' misfortunes would be associated with activation of brain regions that mediate empathic responding (pain matrix, mentalizing network) and not for enviable targets and (B) that activation of those regions would predict decreases in deservingness judgments. Supporting our first hypothesis, the misfortunes of non-enviable targets (as opposed to good fortunes) were associated with activation of the mentalizing network: medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, temporal-parietal junction, and anterior temporal lobes. Supporting our second hypothesis, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex activation from this contrast was negatively correlated with subsequent reports of how much the non-enviable target deserved his/her misfortune. These findings suggest that non-enviable individuals' misfortunes are perceived as unjust due, in part, to the recruitment of the mentalizing network.

Relativistic origins of emotional reactions to events happening to others and to ourselves.

The purpose of the present study was to show that people's emotional reactions to both good and bad events happening to others can be influenced by how their own experiences compare with these events. Female undergraduate students took a test of intellectual ability and received false feedback suggesting that they had done well or poorly. Later, they viewed written feedback apparently given to another participant suggesting that she had performed well or poorly. Finally, participants gave their emotional reactions to their own performance as well as the performance of the other participant. Results showed that participants' relative performance influenced how happy they felt for the high performing other participant and how sad they felt for the low performing other participant. Participants' self-focused emotions of pride and shame were also affected by the relative performance of the other participant.