Cognition, Emotions, and Language in Front-Line Healthcare Workers: Clinical and Ethical Implications for Assessment Measures

Abstract

Objectives. The article aims to reveal language-based markers of stressful experiences in healthcare workers in terms of their cognitions and emotions. The following research questions were formulated for the current study: (1) Are risk and protective factors for psychological stress in healthcare staff, working with patients with COVID-19 aligned with anxiety, depression and resilience? (2) Are there any language-based indicators for emotional distress in healthcare staff, working with patients with COVID-19? (3) What are the key cognitions, emotions, and behavioral patterns are expressed in healthcare workers’ staff language? (4) What are words-associations in the Ukrainian Associative Dictionary aligned with language-based indicators of professional ethics in healthcare staff? Materials and Methods. The study applies Beck’s Depression Inventory (BDI-II), Beck’s Anxiety Inventory (BAI), the Brief Resilient Coping Scale (BRCS), the Psychological Stress Scale (PSM-25), and the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC 2015). Results. Results show that healthcare staff demonstrates a low level of psychological stress, depression and anxiety, and a medium level of resilience. The results of multiple linear regression indicate that the only significant negative predictor of stress is resilience. The psycholinguistic analysis of healthcare staff's narrative on their professional experience treating COVID-19 patients shows the key meaningful categories, namely social contacts, cognitive processes, and time. Social contacts are primarily represented by the category family. The word-associations from the Ukrainian Associative Dictionary indicate that feeling of guilt related to professional ethics in healthcare staff is more expressed in men compared with women. Conclusion. The insights gained from this study may be of assistance to developing effective interventions for healthcare staff during a pandemic, primarily focusing on protective factors and weakening feelings of guilt to prevent moral injury. The study also raises some issues of the clinical psycholinguistic approach to examining emotional distress. This approach would be a fruitful area for further work.