K-means cluster analysis was performed on a Norwegian infantry battalion deployed in Kosovo. A fo... more K-means cluster analysis was performed on a Norwegian infantry battalion deployed in Kosovo. A four-cluster solution was obtained. The High Hardy cluster showed high scores on all three facets of hardiness. The Low Hardy cluster showed low scores on all facets. The Sensation Seeking cluster was described as low on control and commitment but high on challenge. The Rigid Control cluster was characterized by low on challenge but medium to high on control and commitment. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed higher General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-30) scores in the Rigid Controls compared to both the High Hardy and the Sensation Seekers, and the Low Hardy cluster scoring higher than the Sensation Seekers.
Psychological hardiness characterizes people who remain healthy under psychosocial stress. The pr... more Psychological hardiness characterizes people who remain healthy under psychosocial stress. The present exploratory study investigates possible links between hardiness and several immune and neuroendocrine markers: IL-6, IL-12, IL-4, IL-10, & neuropeptide-Y. A total of 21 Norwegian navy cadets were studied in the context of a highly stressful military field exercise. Blood samples were collected midway, and again late in the exercise when stress levels were highest. Psychological hardiness (including commitment, control, and challenge) was measured two days before the exercise. While all subjects scored high in hardiness, some were high only in commitment and control, but relatively low in challenge. These "unbalanced" hardiness subjects were also more stress reactive, showing suppressed proinflammatory cytokines (IL-12), increased anti-inflammatory cytokines (IL-4, IL-10), and lower neuropeptide-Y levels as compared to the hardiness-balanced group. This study thus shows that being high in hardiness with a balanced profile is linked to more moderate and healthy immune and neuroendocrine responses to stress.
INTRODUCTION: A major problem facing military personnel and veterans is alcohol abuse, which can ... more INTRODUCTION: A major problem facing military personnel and veterans is alcohol abuse, which can devastate individual lives, and also drives up health care costs and degrades the readiness of military forces. Alcohol and substance abuse in turn contribute to a range of other negative outcomes including depression, family violence and suicide. Effective screening is essential for early identification of soldiers at high risk for stress-related alcohol problems, in order to target preventive assistance to those who need it most. Current screening tools used in the U.S. Department of Defense are not sufficiently sensitive, failing to identify many at-risk soldiers. These tools ask directly about recent drinking behavior, yielding multiple false-negatives because: (1) troops tend to minimize or deny drinking problems for fear of negative repercussions; (2) many young troops with a drinking problem fail to recognize it as such; and (3) access to alcohol is often highly restricted in thea...
Alcohol abuse is a growing problem in the military, and a costly one. The present study evaluates... more Alcohol abuse is a growing problem in the military, and a costly one. The present study evaluates the potential role of psychological hardiness, an individual resilience resource, to stress-related problem drinking in a military population. We assess the association of psychological hardiness and avoidance coping style with alcohol use patterns in a large national sample of Norwegian military defense personnel. Results show that low hardiness and high avoidance coping are significant predictors of alcohol abuse. Also, the challenge facet of hardiness predicts risk of alcohol abuse among respondents with recent deployment experience, and this effect is greater for those with harsh deployment experiences. Older defense workers are also at higher risk, suggesting cumulative occupational stress may take a toll. This research indicates that hardiness and avoidance coping measures may serve as useful adjunct screening tools for alcohol abuse in the military.
Journal of occupational and organizational psychology, 2015
This study provides empirical data about shipboard practices in bridge operations on board a sele... more This study provides empirical data about shipboard practices in bridge operations on board a selection of platform supply vessels (PSVs). Using the theoretical concept of distributed situation awareness, the study examines how situation awareness (SA)-related information is distributed and coordinated at the bridge. This study thus favours a systems approach to studying SA, viewing it not as a phenomenon that solely happens in each individual's mind but rather as something that happens between individuals and the tools that they use in a collaborative system. Thus, this study adds to our understanding of SA as a distributed phenomenon. Data were collected in four field studies that lasted between 8 and 14 days on PSVs that operate on the Norwegian continental shelf and UK continental shelf. The study revealed pronounced variations in shipboard practices regarding how the bridge team attended to operational planning, communication procedures, and distracting/interrupting factors ...
A large number of studies have shown that hardiness and cohesion are associated with mental healt... more A large number of studies have shown that hardiness and cohesion are associated with mental health in a military context. However, most of them are presented without controlling for baseline mental health symptoms, which is their most significant source of error. The present study investigates the combined effect of hardiness and cohesion in a prospective design, controlling for baseline levels of symptoms among Norwegian personnel serving in a peacekeeping operation in Kosovo. Multivariate regression analyses were performed in which self-reported mental health complaints were regressed on our explanatory variables. Our findings suggest that both cohesion and hardiness contributed to increased stress resiliency, as measured by a lower level of reported mental health complaints. Our baseline measure of mental health accounted for a larger proportion of the variance than our other predictors. A significant interaction between cohesion and hardiness suggested a combined effect, over and above the individual contributions of the predictors. For individuals who scored high on hardiness, cohesion levels did not influence levels of mental health complaints. Individuals who scored low on hardiness, on the other hand, reported lower levels of mental health complaints when cohesion levels were high.
Musculoskeletal disorders account for a higher proportion of sickness absence from work in the Eu... more Musculoskeletal disorders account for a higher proportion of sickness absence from work in the European Union than any other health condition. The present study examined the associations between work environment, dispositional optimism/pessimism and medically certified sickness absence caused by musculoskeletal complaints in a sample of employees from the Norwegian Armed Forces (N = 1190, 77.5% men). Dispositional pessimism, but not optimism, predicted the amount of absence also when taking into account the effects of age and the work environment. Overall, our results support previous studies suggesting that pessimism is a more salient predictor of physical health than optimism. Our results also suggest that it may be beneficial for employers to combine medical treatment of musculoskeletal symptoms with psychological treatment targeting pessimistic outcome expectancies in order to reduce the amount of sickness absence.
This study is the first to our knowledge to examine the cross-language consistency across the ori... more This study is the first to our knowledge to examine the cross-language consistency across the original version of the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathy (CAPP) and a translated version. The CAPP is a lexically based construct map of psychopathy comprising 33 symptoms from 6 broad domains of personality functioning. English-language CAPP prototypicality ratings from 124 mental health workers were compared with ratings from 211 Norwegian mental health workers using the Norwegian translation. High agreement was found across languages in regard to which symptoms where perceived as central to psychopathy or not. Multigroup confirmatory factor analyses (MGCFA) indicated that, overall, the symptoms had similar associations with the 6 proposed underlying dimensions across the 2 language versions. Finally, in general, the probability for a given prototypicality rating on an individual symptom was similar across language version samples at the same level of the underlying trait, as analy...
Much research has now documented the substantial influence of safety climate on a range of import... more Much research has now documented the substantial influence of safety climate on a range of important outcomes in safety critical organizations, but there has been scant attention to the question of what factors might be responsible for positive or negative safety climate. The present paper draws from positive organizational behavior theory to test workplace and individual factors that may affect safety climate. Specifically, we explore the potential influence of authentic leadership style and psychological capital on safety climate and risk outcomes. Across two samples of offshore oil-workers and seafarers working on oil platform supply ships, structural equation modeling yielded results that support a model in which authentic leadership exerts a direct effect on safety climate, as well as an indirect effect via psychological capital. This study shows the importance of leadership qualities as well as psychological factors in shaping a positive work safety climate and lowering the risk of accidents.
P. T. (2010) Psychometric properties of the revised Norwegian dispositional resilience (hardiness... more P. T. (2010) Psychometric properties of the revised Norwegian dispositional resilience (hardiness) scale. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 51, 237-245.
ABSTRACT The present paper examined the influence of personal values and personality hardiness on... more ABSTRACT The present paper examined the influence of personal values and personality hardiness on self-reported safety behaviour among seafarers working onboard general cargo vessels in international trade. We analysed responses from 413 male Filipino seafarers (M-age = 39.51, SD = 10.66) to examine the hypotheses that personal values and hardiness individually and in combination explain variance in self-reported safety behaviour above perceptions of organisational safety climate. A hierarchical multiple regression analysis showed that, controlling for age and safety climate, personal values and hardiness explained a significant proportion of variance in self-reported safety behaviour. Our results also demonstrated evidence of a joint effect of values and personality hardiness. This effect, however, was not in the hypothesised direction. The findings of the present study suggest that an understanding of how personal values and hardiness affect individual safety behaviour may be beneficial to organisations and managers trying to increase maritime safety.
The present study explored sex and cultural differences in Emotional Intelligence scores in sampl... more The present study explored sex and cultural differences in Emotional Intelligence scores in samples from Norway (n = 297) and the United States (n = 234). Significant main effects for sex were found in overall Emotional Intelligence scores and the Empathy factor. In addition, results revealed a small but significant effect for culture in the Self-control factor, as well as support for an interaction between sex and culture in the Handling Relationships factor. The results are discussed in light of cultural differences between U.S. and Norwegian societies.
This study prospectively investigated the effects of psychological hardiness, job control, and jo... more This study prospectively investigated the effects of psychological hardiness, job control, and job demands on medically certified sickness absence. Data from a questionnaire survey were combined with archival data for sickness absence among 7,239 civilian and military employees of the Norwegian Armed Forces (84.3% male, 69.8% military). A 2-component hurdle regression was used in the statistical analyses of the sickness absence data. After controlling for age, sex, and baseline absence, hardiness predicted both the likelihood of having any sickness absence (odds ratio = 0.97) and the number of absence spells (a 6.5% decrease in the expected count for 1 standard deviation change in hardiness). In addition, an interaction was found among hardiness, job control, and psychological demands. When demands were high, high job control was associated with more absence among employees with low levels of hardiness. Together, these findings point to hardiness as an important individual resource in relation to health, and that it is necessary to consider individual differences when examining the effects of work characteristics.
Rasch modelling was conducted by applying the lifetime NODS criteria using data from a national r... more Rasch modelling was conducted by applying the lifetime NODS criteria using data from a national representative sample aged from 15 to 74 years in Norway (N = 5235). To a large extent, the results replicated previous findings, supporting the view that the DSM-IV gambling symptoms have a unidimensional structure. Differential item functioning (DIF) analysis indicated that younger gamblers (aged 15–25 years) were more likely to endorse the symptom of ‘chasing’ than older gamblers. Likewise, DIF analysis indicated that female gamblers were more likely to report ‘escape’ at lower levels of problem gambling than males. Moreover, the results showed that younger gamblers were less likely to endorse symptoms of ‘withdrawal’ and ‘loss of control’ than older gamblers. As the results may be explained by age and gender-specific correlates (or behaviour), future studies should include extended age groups (e.g. 12–75 years) or conduct Rasch modelling and DIF analysis on specific adolescent gambling instruments.
There is evidence that young people are at high risk of developing gambling disorders. The preval... more There is evidence that young people are at high risk of developing gambling disorders. The prevalence and correlates of gambling among youth therefore merit closer study. During spring 2004, a sample of 1,351 boys and girls (aged 16-19 years) from 151 high-school classes (clusters) participated in an internet survey about gambling. The response rate was 69.8%. The instruments used in the survey were the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test and the Massachusetts Adolescent Gambling Screen, in addition to questions about demography. Controlling for the design effect, the estimated prevalence rate was 2.5% for pathological gambling and 1.9% for problem gambling. In all, 7.3% of the boys and 0.6% of the girls fulfilled the criteria for pathological or problem gambling. The results of item analysis of the DSM-IV subscale of MAGS provide support for differential item functioning between boys and girls. A multiple logistic regression analysis revealed that gender (male: OR = 9.09), depression (OR = 9.23), alcohol abuse (OR = 3.62), and dissociation (OR = 1.96) were related to problem and pathological gambling. These results support the view that gambling disorders are best understood as part of an addictive behavior spectrum .
K-means cluster analysis was performed on a Norwegian infantry battalion deployed in Kosovo. A fo... more K-means cluster analysis was performed on a Norwegian infantry battalion deployed in Kosovo. A four-cluster solution was obtained. The High Hardy cluster showed high scores on all three facets of hardiness. The Low Hardy cluster showed low scores on all facets. The Sensation Seeking cluster was described as low on control and commitment but high on challenge. The Rigid Control cluster was characterized by low on challenge but medium to high on control and commitment. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed higher General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-30) scores in the Rigid Controls compared to both the High Hardy and the Sensation Seekers, and the Low Hardy cluster scoring higher than the Sensation Seekers.
Psychological hardiness characterizes people who remain healthy under psychosocial stress. The pr... more Psychological hardiness characterizes people who remain healthy under psychosocial stress. The present exploratory study investigates possible links between hardiness and several immune and neuroendocrine markers: IL-6, IL-12, IL-4, IL-10, & neuropeptide-Y. A total of 21 Norwegian navy cadets were studied in the context of a highly stressful military field exercise. Blood samples were collected midway, and again late in the exercise when stress levels were highest. Psychological hardiness (including commitment, control, and challenge) was measured two days before the exercise. While all subjects scored high in hardiness, some were high only in commitment and control, but relatively low in challenge. These "unbalanced" hardiness subjects were also more stress reactive, showing suppressed proinflammatory cytokines (IL-12), increased anti-inflammatory cytokines (IL-4, IL-10), and lower neuropeptide-Y levels as compared to the hardiness-balanced group. This study thus shows that being high in hardiness with a balanced profile is linked to more moderate and healthy immune and neuroendocrine responses to stress.
INTRODUCTION: A major problem facing military personnel and veterans is alcohol abuse, which can ... more INTRODUCTION: A major problem facing military personnel and veterans is alcohol abuse, which can devastate individual lives, and also drives up health care costs and degrades the readiness of military forces. Alcohol and substance abuse in turn contribute to a range of other negative outcomes including depression, family violence and suicide. Effective screening is essential for early identification of soldiers at high risk for stress-related alcohol problems, in order to target preventive assistance to those who need it most. Current screening tools used in the U.S. Department of Defense are not sufficiently sensitive, failing to identify many at-risk soldiers. These tools ask directly about recent drinking behavior, yielding multiple false-negatives because: (1) troops tend to minimize or deny drinking problems for fear of negative repercussions; (2) many young troops with a drinking problem fail to recognize it as such; and (3) access to alcohol is often highly restricted in thea...
Alcohol abuse is a growing problem in the military, and a costly one. The present study evaluates... more Alcohol abuse is a growing problem in the military, and a costly one. The present study evaluates the potential role of psychological hardiness, an individual resilience resource, to stress-related problem drinking in a military population. We assess the association of psychological hardiness and avoidance coping style with alcohol use patterns in a large national sample of Norwegian military defense personnel. Results show that low hardiness and high avoidance coping are significant predictors of alcohol abuse. Also, the challenge facet of hardiness predicts risk of alcohol abuse among respondents with recent deployment experience, and this effect is greater for those with harsh deployment experiences. Older defense workers are also at higher risk, suggesting cumulative occupational stress may take a toll. This research indicates that hardiness and avoidance coping measures may serve as useful adjunct screening tools for alcohol abuse in the military.
Journal of occupational and organizational psychology, 2015
This study provides empirical data about shipboard practices in bridge operations on board a sele... more This study provides empirical data about shipboard practices in bridge operations on board a selection of platform supply vessels (PSVs). Using the theoretical concept of distributed situation awareness, the study examines how situation awareness (SA)-related information is distributed and coordinated at the bridge. This study thus favours a systems approach to studying SA, viewing it not as a phenomenon that solely happens in each individual's mind but rather as something that happens between individuals and the tools that they use in a collaborative system. Thus, this study adds to our understanding of SA as a distributed phenomenon. Data were collected in four field studies that lasted between 8 and 14 days on PSVs that operate on the Norwegian continental shelf and UK continental shelf. The study revealed pronounced variations in shipboard practices regarding how the bridge team attended to operational planning, communication procedures, and distracting/interrupting factors ...
A large number of studies have shown that hardiness and cohesion are associated with mental healt... more A large number of studies have shown that hardiness and cohesion are associated with mental health in a military context. However, most of them are presented without controlling for baseline mental health symptoms, which is their most significant source of error. The present study investigates the combined effect of hardiness and cohesion in a prospective design, controlling for baseline levels of symptoms among Norwegian personnel serving in a peacekeeping operation in Kosovo. Multivariate regression analyses were performed in which self-reported mental health complaints were regressed on our explanatory variables. Our findings suggest that both cohesion and hardiness contributed to increased stress resiliency, as measured by a lower level of reported mental health complaints. Our baseline measure of mental health accounted for a larger proportion of the variance than our other predictors. A significant interaction between cohesion and hardiness suggested a combined effect, over and above the individual contributions of the predictors. For individuals who scored high on hardiness, cohesion levels did not influence levels of mental health complaints. Individuals who scored low on hardiness, on the other hand, reported lower levels of mental health complaints when cohesion levels were high.
Musculoskeletal disorders account for a higher proportion of sickness absence from work in the Eu... more Musculoskeletal disorders account for a higher proportion of sickness absence from work in the European Union than any other health condition. The present study examined the associations between work environment, dispositional optimism/pessimism and medically certified sickness absence caused by musculoskeletal complaints in a sample of employees from the Norwegian Armed Forces (N = 1190, 77.5% men). Dispositional pessimism, but not optimism, predicted the amount of absence also when taking into account the effects of age and the work environment. Overall, our results support previous studies suggesting that pessimism is a more salient predictor of physical health than optimism. Our results also suggest that it may be beneficial for employers to combine medical treatment of musculoskeletal symptoms with psychological treatment targeting pessimistic outcome expectancies in order to reduce the amount of sickness absence.
This study is the first to our knowledge to examine the cross-language consistency across the ori... more This study is the first to our knowledge to examine the cross-language consistency across the original version of the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathy (CAPP) and a translated version. The CAPP is a lexically based construct map of psychopathy comprising 33 symptoms from 6 broad domains of personality functioning. English-language CAPP prototypicality ratings from 124 mental health workers were compared with ratings from 211 Norwegian mental health workers using the Norwegian translation. High agreement was found across languages in regard to which symptoms where perceived as central to psychopathy or not. Multigroup confirmatory factor analyses (MGCFA) indicated that, overall, the symptoms had similar associations with the 6 proposed underlying dimensions across the 2 language versions. Finally, in general, the probability for a given prototypicality rating on an individual symptom was similar across language version samples at the same level of the underlying trait, as analy...
Much research has now documented the substantial influence of safety climate on a range of import... more Much research has now documented the substantial influence of safety climate on a range of important outcomes in safety critical organizations, but there has been scant attention to the question of what factors might be responsible for positive or negative safety climate. The present paper draws from positive organizational behavior theory to test workplace and individual factors that may affect safety climate. Specifically, we explore the potential influence of authentic leadership style and psychological capital on safety climate and risk outcomes. Across two samples of offshore oil-workers and seafarers working on oil platform supply ships, structural equation modeling yielded results that support a model in which authentic leadership exerts a direct effect on safety climate, as well as an indirect effect via psychological capital. This study shows the importance of leadership qualities as well as psychological factors in shaping a positive work safety climate and lowering the risk of accidents.
P. T. (2010) Psychometric properties of the revised Norwegian dispositional resilience (hardiness... more P. T. (2010) Psychometric properties of the revised Norwegian dispositional resilience (hardiness) scale. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 51, 237-245.
ABSTRACT The present paper examined the influence of personal values and personality hardiness on... more ABSTRACT The present paper examined the influence of personal values and personality hardiness on self-reported safety behaviour among seafarers working onboard general cargo vessels in international trade. We analysed responses from 413 male Filipino seafarers (M-age = 39.51, SD = 10.66) to examine the hypotheses that personal values and hardiness individually and in combination explain variance in self-reported safety behaviour above perceptions of organisational safety climate. A hierarchical multiple regression analysis showed that, controlling for age and safety climate, personal values and hardiness explained a significant proportion of variance in self-reported safety behaviour. Our results also demonstrated evidence of a joint effect of values and personality hardiness. This effect, however, was not in the hypothesised direction. The findings of the present study suggest that an understanding of how personal values and hardiness affect individual safety behaviour may be beneficial to organisations and managers trying to increase maritime safety.
The present study explored sex and cultural differences in Emotional Intelligence scores in sampl... more The present study explored sex and cultural differences in Emotional Intelligence scores in samples from Norway (n = 297) and the United States (n = 234). Significant main effects for sex were found in overall Emotional Intelligence scores and the Empathy factor. In addition, results revealed a small but significant effect for culture in the Self-control factor, as well as support for an interaction between sex and culture in the Handling Relationships factor. The results are discussed in light of cultural differences between U.S. and Norwegian societies.
This study prospectively investigated the effects of psychological hardiness, job control, and jo... more This study prospectively investigated the effects of psychological hardiness, job control, and job demands on medically certified sickness absence. Data from a questionnaire survey were combined with archival data for sickness absence among 7,239 civilian and military employees of the Norwegian Armed Forces (84.3% male, 69.8% military). A 2-component hurdle regression was used in the statistical analyses of the sickness absence data. After controlling for age, sex, and baseline absence, hardiness predicted both the likelihood of having any sickness absence (odds ratio = 0.97) and the number of absence spells (a 6.5% decrease in the expected count for 1 standard deviation change in hardiness). In addition, an interaction was found among hardiness, job control, and psychological demands. When demands were high, high job control was associated with more absence among employees with low levels of hardiness. Together, these findings point to hardiness as an important individual resource in relation to health, and that it is necessary to consider individual differences when examining the effects of work characteristics.
Rasch modelling was conducted by applying the lifetime NODS criteria using data from a national r... more Rasch modelling was conducted by applying the lifetime NODS criteria using data from a national representative sample aged from 15 to 74 years in Norway (N = 5235). To a large extent, the results replicated previous findings, supporting the view that the DSM-IV gambling symptoms have a unidimensional structure. Differential item functioning (DIF) analysis indicated that younger gamblers (aged 15–25 years) were more likely to endorse the symptom of ‘chasing’ than older gamblers. Likewise, DIF analysis indicated that female gamblers were more likely to report ‘escape’ at lower levels of problem gambling than males. Moreover, the results showed that younger gamblers were less likely to endorse symptoms of ‘withdrawal’ and ‘loss of control’ than older gamblers. As the results may be explained by age and gender-specific correlates (or behaviour), future studies should include extended age groups (e.g. 12–75 years) or conduct Rasch modelling and DIF analysis on specific adolescent gambling instruments.
There is evidence that young people are at high risk of developing gambling disorders. The preval... more There is evidence that young people are at high risk of developing gambling disorders. The prevalence and correlates of gambling among youth therefore merit closer study. During spring 2004, a sample of 1,351 boys and girls (aged 16-19 years) from 151 high-school classes (clusters) participated in an internet survey about gambling. The response rate was 69.8%. The instruments used in the survey were the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test and the Massachusetts Adolescent Gambling Screen, in addition to questions about demography. Controlling for the design effect, the estimated prevalence rate was 2.5% for pathological gambling and 1.9% for problem gambling. In all, 7.3% of the boys and 0.6% of the girls fulfilled the criteria for pathological or problem gambling. The results of item analysis of the DSM-IV subscale of MAGS provide support for differential item functioning between boys and girls. A multiple logistic regression analysis revealed that gender (male: OR = 9.09), depression (OR = 9.23), alcohol abuse (OR = 3.62), and dissociation (OR = 1.96) were related to problem and pathological gambling. These results support the view that gambling disorders are best understood as part of an addictive behavior spectrum .
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Papers by Sigurd Hystad