Facing Others’ Trauma: A Role-Taking Theory of Burnout

Abstract

The experience of “burnout” is characterized by emotional fatigue and detachment associated with intensive stress. Burnout is prevalent across personal and professional spheres, with increasing cultural salience. Multiple factors can contribute to burnout. Here, we focus on one: exposure to others’ trauma. This circumstance spans domains from social service professions to social media newsfeeds, with potentially deleterious effects on the self. To understand the conditions under which trauma exposure results in burnout, we propose and test a role–taking model. We do so by presenting study participants (N = 723) with a first–person account of intimate partner violence, stimulating an acute instance of trauma exposure. Findings show that higher levels of role–taking increase burnout, with antecedents and outcomes tied to role-taking’s cognitive and affective components. This study clarifies how burnout occurs within the scope of trauma exposure while expanding role–taking research beyond the interpersonal benefits that have monopolized scholarly attention to date.

The Power of a 😉: Emojis Reducing Ambiguity in Digitally Mediated Romantic Encounters

“…This discomfort was somewhat explained by reduced clarity of the Black couple's intentions which may stem from reduced levels of role‐taking with Black Snapchat characters. Prior scholarship has found that holding stereotypic beliefs reduced both cognitive and empathic role‐taking with victims of intimate partner violence (Groggel, Davis, and Love 2022). A similar mechanism could be occurring here with participants' reliance on racialized stereotypes reducing the extent to which participants actively sought to understand the Black characters' thoughts and feelings.…”

“…This suggests that the findings were conservative and likely underestimated the predictive power of role‐taking on the clarity of characters' intentions or comfort with a flirtatious message. Future work could operationalize empathic role‐taking by comparing participants' self‐reported emotional states prior to and immediately after reading the conversation and incorporate a narrative transportation scale to measure cognitive role‐taking (Groggel, Davis, and Love 2022).…”

A Proposed Framework of Research on the Influencing Factors of Burnout - Based on the Perspective of Individual Work Scenarios

“…It is defined by a significant loss of physical and mental energy (de Vries & Bakker, 2022;Schaufeli et al, 2020). The term "burnout" was initially introduced in the 1970s to experience emotional exhaustion, a sense of reduced personal accomplishment, and a loss of motivation in their work (Freudenberger, 1974;Groggel et al, 2022).…”

Haunting details: A mixed‐methods study on predictors of details recalled from a victim narrative

“…Recent scholarship has cast feeling transportation into a narrative as role‐taking (Groggel et al., 2022). Mead (1934) viewed “taking the attitude of the other” as placing oneself in the other's shoes, anticipating the behavior or state of mind of the other and responding accordingly.…”