Concerns regarding high rates of teacher stress and burnout are present globally. Yet there is limited current data regarding the severity of stress, or the role of intrapersonal and environmental factors in relation to teacher stress and burnout within the Australian context. The present study, conducted over an 18-month period, prior to the COVID pandemic, surveyed 749 Australian teachers to explore their experience of work-related stress and burnout; differences in stress and burnout across different demographic groups within the profession; as well as the contributing role of intrapersonal and environmental factors, particularly, emotion regulation, subjective well-being, and workload. Results showed over half of the sample reported being very or extremely stressed and were considering leaving the profession, with early career teachers, primary teachers, and teachers working in rural and remote areas reporting the highest stress and burnout levels. Conditional process analyses highlighted the importance of emotion regulation, workload and subjective well-being in the development of teacher stress and some forms of burnout. Implications for educational practice are discussed.

Attention selects behaviorally relevant stimuli for further capacity-limited processing and gates their access to awareness. Given the importance of attention for conscious perception, it is important to determine the factors and mechanisms that drive attention. A widespread view is that attention is biased to the specific feature values of a conjunction target (e.g., vertical, red, medium). By contrast, the results of the present study show that attention is tuned to the 2 relative features that distinguish a conjunction target from the irrelevant nontargets (e.g., larger and bluer). Moreover, an irrelevant conjunction cue that is briefly presented prior to the target can automatically attract attention, even in the absence of any feature contrasts. Importantly, automatic orienting to the conjunction cue was completely independent of the physical similarity between cue and target, and depended only on whether the conjunction cue matched the relative features of the target. These results demonstrate that attentional orienting is determined by a mechanism that can rapidly extract information about feature relationships and guide attention to the stimulus that best matches the relative attributes of the target. These results are difficult to reconcile with extant feature-specific accounts or object-based accounts of attention and argue for a relational account of conjunction search. (PsycINFO Database Record

Humans rely on their ability to infer another person's mental state to understand and predict others' behavior ("theory of mind," ToM). Multiple lines of research suggest that not only are humans able to consciously process another person's belief state, but also are able to do so implicitly. Here we explored how general implicit belief states are represented in the brain, compared to those substrates involved in explicit ToM processes. Previous work on this topic has yielded conflicting results, and thus, the extent to which the implicit and explicit ToM systems draw on common neural bases is unclear. Participants were presented with "Sally-Anne" type movies in which a protagonist was falsely led to believe a ball was in one location, only for a puppet to later move it to another location in their absence (false-belief condition). In other movies, the protagonist had their back turned the entire time the puppet moved the ball between the two locations, meaning that they had no opportunity to develop any pre-existing beliefs about the scenario (no-belief condition). Using a group of independently localized explicit ToM brain regions, we found greater activity for false-belief trials, relative to no-belief trials, in the right temporoparietal junction, right superior temporal sulcus, precuneus, and left middle prefrontal gyrus. These findings extend upon previous work on the neural bases of implicit ToM by showing substantial overlap between this system and the explicit ToM system, suggesting that both abilities might recruit a common set of mentalizing processes/functional brain regions. Hum Brain Mapp 38:4760-4772, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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