Since its introduction by Freudenberger in 1974, the burnout syndrome has received much publicity, and the field has seen tremendous growth. Even in the scholarly press, however, most publications have been non-empirical in nature. The current paper examines the existing empirical evidence concerning symptoms of burnout among human service professionals, published from 1974 to the end of 1984.

Figure drawing tests continue to be popular with clinicians despite the relatively unfavourable conclusions of a number of published literature reviews. The current paper examines the empirical literature on the reliability and validity of human figure drawing tests, used as a projective device with adult subjects, covering the period between January 1967 and June 1982. The areas surveyed include reliability estimates, evidence relevant to the body-image hypothesis, the validity of hypotheses concerning structural and formal drawing variables and the content of figure drawings, the performance of global measures, and the influence of confounding factors.

The current study investigated the phenomenon of professional burnout among psychologists of varying experience. Self-report measures were employed in a mail survey of Ontario psychologists. The average level of burnout, as assessed by the Tedium measure, was i n the low moderate range ( M of 3.0 on a 7-point scale). Of the total sample of 255 subjects, 6.3% were determined to be burned out. Burnout was not related to experience in the profession or to other demographic variables but was significantly related to social support from family and friends. to expectations or attitudes about the profession, and less strongly, to changes in expectations over time (disillusionment). Graduate students reported significantly more disillusionment than practitioners.The term "burnout" was introduced by Freudenberger in 1974 to refer to a phenomenon which he had observed in himself and in coworkers in the free-clinic movement. He defined burnouc as "to fail, wear out, or become exhausted by making excessive demands on energy, strength, or resources" and attributed it to the unceasing pressures of working with emotionally needy and demanding individuals (Freudenberger, 1974). A more recent definition is that of Pines and Aronson (1981), who refer to burnout simply as "physical, emotional, and mental (i.e., attitudinal) exhaustion" (p. 202).Since the introduction of the term a decade ago, the concept of burnout has received great publicity in both the popular and the scholarly press, and an increasing number of serious investigators have turned their attention to the phenomenon. Discussions and studies of burnout have tended to focus on organizational and job-specific factors in the etiology of the syndrome; see reviews by Daniel and Rogers ( 198 1 ) and Perlman and Hartman ( 1982 ) .As the experience of burnout has become increasingly recognized and legitimized, the contribution of individual and job-extrinsic factors has been acknowledged, although little research has been done.Two variables of especial interest that have been largely ignored by investigators are the issue of jo5-extrinsic social support as an ameliorating factor and the role of individual expectations and disillusionment in the development of burnout.A good deal of empirical evidence exists that personal relations and social support in the workplace are related to burnout (Pines & Aronson, 1981;