Aims:In order for hospitals to work efficiently in a pandemic, it is important to know how a pandemic affects the hospital staff. The aim of the present study was to investigate the psychological impact of the pandemic (H1N1) 2009 on hospital workers and how it was affected by the characteristics of the hospital, gender, age, job and work environment. Methods:In late June 2009, soon after the pandemic had ended in Kobe city, Japan, a questionnaire was distributed consisting of questions on sociodemographic characteristics, 19 stress-related questions and the Impact of Event Scale (IES) to all 3635 employees at three core general hospitals in Kobe. Exploratory factor analysis was applied to the 19 stress-related questions, and this produced four factors for evaluation (anxiety about infection, exhaustion, workload, and feeling of being protected). Multiple regression models were used to evaluate the association of personal characteristics with each score of the four factors and the IES.Results: Valid answers were received from 1625 employees. Workers at a hospital with intense liaison psychiatric services felt less psychological impact. Workers at a hospital that provided staff with information about the pandemic less frequently, felt unprotected. Workers in work environments that had a high risk of infection felt more anxious and more exhausted. The total IES score was higher in workers in high-risk work environments. Conclusions:It is important for hospitals to protect hospital workers during a pandemic and to rapidly share information about the pandemic. Liaison psychiatric services can help to reduce the impact of the pandemic on hospital workers.

Human foragers are obligately group-living, and their high dependence on mutual aid is believed to have characterized our species' social evolution. It was therefore a central adaptive problem for our ancestors to avoid damaging the willingness of other group members to render them assistance. Cognitively, this requires a predictive map of the degree to which others would devalue the individual based on each of various possible acts. With such a map, an individual can avoid socially costly behaviors by anticipating how much audience devaluation a potential action (e.g., stealing) would cause and weigh this against the action's direct payoff (e.g., acquiring). The shame system manifests all of the functional properties required to solve this adaptive problem, with the aversive intensity of shame encoding the social cost. Previous data from three Western(ized) societies indicated that the shame evoked when the individual anticipates committing various acts closely tracks the magnitude of devaluation expressed by audiences in response to those acts. Here we report data supporting the broader claim that shame is a basic part of human biology. We conducted an experiment among 899 participants in 15 small-scale communities scattered around the world. Despite widely varying languages, cultures, and subsistence modes, shame in each community closely tracked the devaluation of local audiences (mean = +0.84). The fact that the same pattern is encountered in such mutually remote communities suggests that shame's match to audience devaluation is a design feature crafted by selection and not a product of cultural contact or convergent cultural evolution.

We found a high PIU prevalence among Japanese young adults. The factors that predicted PIU were: female sex, older age, poor sleep quality, ADHD tendencies, depression, and anxiety.

What motives do people prioritize in their social lives? Historically, social psychologists, especially those adopting an evolutionary perspective, have devoted a great deal of research attention to sexual attraction and romantic-partner choice (mate seeking). Research on long-term familial bonds (mate retention and kin care) has been less thoroughly connected to relevant comparative and evolutionary work on other species, and in the case of kin care, these bonds have been less well researched. Examining varied sources of data from 27 societies around the world, we found that people generally view familial motives as primary in importance and mate-seeking motives as relatively low in importance. Compared with other groups, college students, single people, and men place relatively higher emphasis on mate seeking, but even those samples rated kin-care motives as more important. Furthermore, motives linked to long-term familial bonds are positively associated with psychological well-being, but mate-seeking motives are associated with anxiety and depression. We address theoretical and empirical reasons why there has been extensive research on mate seeking and why people prioritize goals related to long-term familial bonds over mating goals. Reallocating relatively greater research effort toward long-term familial relationships would likely yield many interesting new findings relevant to everyday people’s highest social priorities.