Steps toward developing a comprehensive fatigue monitoring and mitigation solution: perspectives from a cohort of United States Naval Surface Force officers.

Study Objectives: This study analyzed fatigue and its management in US Naval Surface Force warships, focusing on understanding current practices and barriers, and examining the influence of organizational and individual factors on managing chronic fatigue. Furthermore, this study explored the impact of organizational and individual factors on fatigue management. Methods: As part of a larger study, 154 naval officers (mean ±â€…standard deviation; 31.5 ±â€…7.0 years; 8.8 ±â€…6.8 years of service; 125 male, and 29 female) completed a fatigue survey. The survey addressed (1) self-reported fatigue, (2) fatigue observed in others, (3) fatigue monitoring strategies, (4) fatigue mitigation strategies, and (5) barriers to fatigue mitigation. Logistic and ordinal regressions were performed to examine the effect of individual (i.e. sleep quality and years in military service) and organizational (i.e. ship-class) factors on fatigue outcomes. Results: Fatigue was frequently experienced and observed by 23% and 54% of officers, respectively. Of note, officers often monitored fatigue reactively (i.e. 65% observed others nodding off and 55% observed behavioral impairments). Still, officers did not frequently implement fatigue mitigation strategies, citing few operationally feasible mitigation strategies (62.3%), being too busy (61.7%), and not having clear thresholds for action (48.7%). Fatigue management varies across organizational factors, which must be considered when further developing fatigue management strategies. Conclusions: Fatigue remains a critical concern aboard surface force ships and it may be better addressed through development of objective sleep and fatigue monitoring tools that could inform leadership decision-making.

Organizational caring as a predictor of good mental health in an operational naval environment.

Military service members encounter numerous stressors that adversely affect their mental health. These pervasive stressors emphasize the need to continually surveil, identify, and mitigate negative factors before they can produce cascading consequences for the individual. The present study utilized a large sample (N = 13,666) to identify several factors that might lead individuals to have poor mental health days in an austere naval operating environment. One quarter of respondents (N = 3,484; 25.49%) indicated that they had 0 poor mental health days in the preceding month, whereas one in eight (N = 1,868; 13.57%) indicated experiencing poor mental health every day in the preceding month. This bimodal distribution allowed for binary logistic regression to determine the relative influence of various factors in identifying individuals who reported significant mental health concerns versus those who did not. Split-half analyses also permitted replication of the data through randomized sampling and dividing data by ship class. Gender emerged as the most prominent predictor of mental health quality with females reporting poorer mental health. Meanwhile, organizational caring (a service member's belief that higher organizational levels cared about them) emerged as a protective factor. Perceptions of caring among the organizational hierarchy depended upon organizational tier; that is, a connection to the larger organization functioned as an even more robust predictor than perceptions that their local and more salient organizational structure (e.g., direct supervisor) cared about them. Taken together, this evidence helps identify factors related to mental health issues that may negatively impact military personnel on active duty. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Selecting senior leaders in the public sector: Challenges and best practices.

Although the careful assessment and selection of leaders are important for an organization to succeed, selecting senior leaders can prove paramount given their potential to impact the entire organization. While private sector businesses expend substantial resources to recruit and retain senior leaders, the public sector struggles to do so, which in turn impacts the attitudes and retention of employees throughout the enterprise. For example, a recent survey of federal employees in the United States found that most respondents did not believe their senior leaders generated high levels of motivation and commitment in the workforce. Enhancing the senior leader selection process thus represents a prime opportunity to enhance organizational success in the public sector. The current discussion reviews four core topics for senior leader selection: (a) determine organizational needs, (b) agree upon competencies for a senior leader, (c) leverage employees from all organizational tiers via a selection committee, and (d) examine ethical issues in selecting senior leaders. Each topic contains an overview of the relative challenge while drawing a contrast between senior and junior leadership positions, as well as comparisons between the public and private sectors. These challenges are presented alongside best practices that should produce a more effective selection process. Taken together, this combined evidence should enable organizational success by ensuring that the highest quality candidates are selected into senior leadership positions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Psychological endurance: how grit, resilience, and related factors contribute to sustained effort despite adversity.

Many concepts describe how individuals sustain effort despite challenging circumstances. For example, scholars and practitioners may incorporate discussions of grit, hardiness, self-control, and resilience into their ideas of performance under adversity. Although there are nuanced points underlying each construct capable of generating empirically sound propositions, the shared attributes make them difficult to differentiate. As a result, substantial confusion arises when debating how these related factors concomitantly contribute to success, especially when practitioners attempt to communicate these ideas in applied settings. The model proposed here-psychological endurance-is a unified theory to explore how multiple concepts contribute to sustained goal-directed behaviors and individual success. Central to this model is the metaphor of a psychological battery, which potentiates and sustains optimal performance despite adversity. Grit and hardiness are associated with the maximum charge of the psychological battery, or how long an individual could sustain effort. Self-control modulates energy management that augments effort required to sustain endurance, whereas resilience represents the ability to recharge. These factors are constrained by both psychological and physiological stressors in the environment that drain the psychology battery. Taken together, these ideas form a novel framework to discuss related psychological concepts, and ideally, optimize intervention to enhance psychological endurance.

Customizing virtual interpersonal skills training applications may not improve trainee performance.

While some theoretical perspectives imply that the context of a virtual training should be customized to match the intended context where those skills would ultimately be applied, others suggest this might not be necessary for learning. It is important to determine whether manipulating context matters for performance in training applications because customized virtual training systems made for specific use cases are more costly than generic "off-the-shelf" ones designed for a broader set of users. Accordingly, we report a study where military cadets use a virtual platform to practice their negotiation skills, and are randomly assigned to one of two virtual context conditions: military versus civilian. Out of 28 measures capturing performance in the negotiation, there was only one significant result: cadets in the civilian condition politely ask the agent to make an offer significantly more than those in the military condition. These results imply that-for this interpersonal skills application, and perhaps ones like it-virtual context may matter very little for performance during social skills training, and that commercial systems may yield real benefits to military scenarios with little-to-no modification.

Deficits in Visual Processing During Hypoxia as Evidenced by Visual Mismatch Negativity.

INTRODUCTION: Hypoxia is an ever-present threat in tactical aviation and gained recent attention due to its putative role in physiological episodes. Previous work has demonstrated that hypoxia negatively impacts a variety of sensory, cognitive, and motor systems. In particular, the visual system is one of the earliest systems affected by hypoxia. While the majority of previous studies have relied on self-report and behavioral testing, the use of event-related potentials as a novel tool to monitor responses to low oxygen in humans has recently been investigated. Specifically, ERP components that are evoked passively in response to unattended changes in background sensory stimulation have been explored.METHOD: Subjects (N 28) completed a continuous visuomotor tracking task while EEG was recorded. During the tracking task, a series of standard color checkerboard patterns were presented in the periphery while occasionally a deviant color checkerboard was presented. The visual mismatch negativity (MMN) component was assessed in response to the deviant compared to the standard stimuli. Subjects completed two sessions in counterbalanced order that only differed by the oxygen concentration breathed (10.6% vs. 20.4%).RESULTS: Results demonstrated a significant reduction in the amplitude of the visual MMN under hypoxic compared to normoxic conditions, showing a 50% reduction in amplitude during hypoxia. Our results suggest that during low-oxygen exposure the ability to detect environmental changes and process sensory information is impaired.DISCUSSION: The visual MMN may represent an early and reliable predictor of sensory and cognitive deficits during hypoxia exposure, which may be of great use to the aviation community.Blacker KJ, Seech TR, Funke ME, Kinney MJ. Deficits in visual processing during hypoxia as evidenced by visual mismatch negativity. Aerosp Med Hum Perform. 2021; 92(5):326332.

Impaired Sensory Processing During Low-Oxygen Exposure: A Noninvasive Approach to Detecting Changes in Cognitive States.

The ability to detect novelty in our environment is a critical sensory function. A reliable set of event-related potentials (ERP), known as the auditory deviance response (ADR), are elicited in the absence of directed attention and indexes functionally relevant networks. The ADR consists of three peaks: mismatch negativity (MMN), P3a, and reorienting negativity (RON) that are sequentially evoked in response to unattended changes in repetitive background stimulation. While previous studies have established the ADR's sensitivity to a range of pharmacologic and nonpharmacologic interventions and are leading candidate biomarkers of perturbations of the central nervous system (CNS), here we sought to determine if ADR peaks are sensitive to decreases in breathable oxygen. Participants performed a visuomotor tracking task while EEG was recorded during two 27-min sessions. The two sessions differed in the amount of environmental oxygen available: 10.6% O2 (hypoxia) versus 20.4% O2 (normoxia). ERPs were measured while a series of identical, or "standard," tones combined with occasional "oddball," tones, were presented. MMN, P3a, and RON were assessed in response to the oddball compared to the standard stimuli. Behavioral impairment during hypoxia was demonstrated by a deficit in tracking performance compared to the normoxia condition. Whereas no changes were detected in the MMN or RON, the amplitude of the P3a component was significantly reduced during hypoxia compared to normoxia, within the first 9 min of exposure. To our knowledge, this is the first study to demonstrate the effect of low oxygen exposure on passively elicited neural measures of early sensory processing. This study demonstrates that passively elicited EEG measures, reflecting preattentive auditory processing, are disrupted by acute hypoxia. Results have implications for the development of biomarkers for the noninvasive assessment of CNS perturbations.