Reducing Inoperative Days of Soldiers Under Stress: A Novel Approach

Stress is proven to be one of the major causes of work absenteeism of professionals working in public safety. The high rate of inoperative days and the related financial costs highlight the need for an effective stress-reaction assessment tool. The here presented psychometric system architecture proposes the evaluation and monitoring of the reliability of individuals in high risk professions, by analyzing the individual’s capability to transform an arbitrary state of mind (hereby represented as self- and world-schema) to a stress coping level. This is performed to predict the development of psychological disorders and violent behaviour, useful in military contexts. On the basis of Bond's and Vaillant's hierarchy of coping mechanisms, we developed a novel approach to analyze the extent to which the individual i) shows cognitive bias in perceiving new information, ii) is prone to violent behavior, or iii) performs major reality distortion, by considering relations between the manifestation level and the current schema of the individual. The objective is to detect, during both recruitment and ongoing monitoring phases, which individuals have maladaptive behaviour and/or mental state. The immediate quantifiable benefit we forecast, thanks to the devised instrument, is the reduction of inoperative days brought by stress-related traumas of various nature and intensity, as a result of selecting only individuals with a higher degree of coping mechanisms.