Eric Laurent

• B.S., M.S., Ph.D.
• Université de Franche-Comté - UMR INSERM 1322

Whether burnout is a form of depression is unclear. The aim of this study was to examine the relevance of the burnout-depression distinction by comparing attentional processing of emotional information in burnout and depression. Eye tracking technology was employed for assessing overt attentional deployment. The gaze of 54 human services employees...

I review the data on human visual perception that reveal the critical role played by non-visual contextual factors influencing visual activity. The global perspective that progressively emerges reveals that vision is sensitive to multiple couplings with other systems whose nature and levels of abstraction in science are highly variable. Contrary to...

There is no consensus on whether burnout constitutes a depressive condition or an original entity requiring specific medical and legal recognition. In this study, we examined burnout–depression overlap using 14 samples of individuals from various countries and occupational domains (N = 12,417). Meta-analytically pooled disattenuated correlations in...

This study tested the influence of mood on the perception of the sitting affordance in two experiments. The objective of Experiment 1 was to evaluate participants' perception of the sitting affordance, without mood induction. Forty-three participants assessed their maximum sitting height (SHmax) from different seat heights (perceptual SHmax) before...

According to the ecological approach to perception, affordances (i.e., action possibilities) are perceived directly in the environment and body-scaled. Previous theoretical work has suggested that the perception of action possibilities is influenced by depression (which has sometimes been conceived as an action-related disorder). However, thus far...

As people age, they tend to spend more time indoors, and the colours in their surroundings may significantly impact their mood and overall well‐being. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence to provide informed guidance on colour choices, irrespective of age group. To work towards informed choices, we investigated whether the associations be...

In everyday life, adaptive behavior depends on the ability to perceive action possibilities. The field of research on affordances has addressed how individuals perceive action possibilities through the coupling between the perceiver's capacity and environmental features. However, with the increasing digitalization of our environment, people usually...

During the last 20 years, the concept of emotional intelligence (EI) has gained significant attention in psychology. Traditionally, EI has been conceptualized as the ability to reason with and/or about one’s own emotions and/or in the presence of emotion-related stimuli. This chapter presents an enactive framework for conceptualizing EI as a contex...

Social cognition enables the processing of information necessary to evolve within a social group. Neuropsychology explores models linking brain networks to social information processing. Social cognition is closely tied to the concept of Emotional Intelligence (EI), defined as the mental ability involved in accurately perceiving, understanding, usi...

Studies on the color category PURPLE yielded inconsistent category boundaries, focal colors, and color-emotion associations. In French, there are at least three color terms referring to the shades of purple, potentially weighing on these inconsistencies. Thus, we tested the semantic breadth and richness in semantic meaning of violet (basic term), l...

Previous literature on lie detection abilities bears an interesting paradox. On the group level, people detect others’ lies at guessing level. However, when asked to evaluate their own abilities, people report being able to detect lies (i.e., self-reported lie detection). Understanding this paradox is important because decisions which rely on credi...

The pursuit of happiness has been an important component of philosophical thought for a long time. Traditionally, happiness could be viewed as the result of rational thinking and personal project management. We review the literature in cognitive biology and psychology revealing why happiness could complementarily be conceived as an emerging feeling...

Perceiving that which is “doable” is a fundamental adaptive process. However, little is known about i) action boundary perception in numerical environments and ii) the potential role of age in the modification of these abilities. Participants performed the Action Boundary Perception Online Task (ABP-OT), a fully computerized and web-based adaptatio...

Suicidal behaviors (SBs) are often associated with impaired performance on neuropsychological executive functioning (EF) measures that encourage the development of more specific and reliable tools. Recent evidence could suggest that saccadic movement using eye tracking can provide reliable information on EF in depressive elderly. The aim of this st...

The colour category PURPLE is strangely heterogeneous, potentially due to the use of different cognates. We asked French speakers from Algeria, France, and Switzerland (n = 274) to produce up to three free associations with violet (basic term), pourpre, and lilas (non-basic terms). We counted 2,075 associations. We developed a coding scheme that i)...

“I could have done better”. You have most likely heard or said this on many occasions before. Sometimes, we produce a motor performance that is not the expected one. In the present research, we investigated the role of mood in the moderation of expectations derived from the perception of the sitting affordance. In Experiment 1, 43 participants (27...

When we need to reach an object, we have an expectation regarding this action possibility, that is about the fact that we can reach this object or not. According to the learned helplessness theory (Seligman, 1975), expectations concerning action are impaired in depression, because no gratification ensue from action. This study aimed to investigate...

Many of us “see red,” “feel blue,” or “turn green with envy.” Are such color-emotion associations fundamental to our shared cognitive architecture, or are they cultural creations learned through our languages and traditions? To answer these questions, we tested emotional associations of colors in 4,598 participants from 30 nations speaking 22 nativ...

A sample of 1015 educational staff members, exhibiting various levels of burnout and depressive symptoms, underwent a memory test involving incident encoding of positive and negative words and a free recall task. Burnout and depression were each found to be associated with increased recall of negative items and decreased recall of positive items. R...

Burnout has been viewed as a work-induced condition combining exhaustion, cynicism, and professional inefficacy. Using correlational analyses, an exploratory structural equation modeling bifactor analysis, structural regression analyses, and a network analysis, we examined the claim that burnout should not be mistaken for a depressive syndrome. The...

Across cultures, people associate colours with emotions. Here, we test the hypothesis that one driver of this cross-modal correspondence is the physical environment we live in. We focus on a prime example – the association of yellow with joy, – which conceivably arises because yellow is reminiscent of life-sustaining sunshine and pleasant weather....

While symbolic meanings of colour might be the making of cultural customs (e.g., white vs. red worn at weddings in Western world vs. China/Japan), little is known whether emotion associations with colour are also culture-specific, or rather universal. We performed a comprehensive, systematic survey on conceptual colour-affect associations in 30 cou...

Burnout has been defined as a job-related syndrome combining pervasive fatigue and loss of motivation. In recent years, evidence has mounted that burnout may reflect a depressive condition. In this study, we expanded on past investigations of burnout-depression overlap by focusing on interpretation biases toward ambiguous information among the two...

In this 257-participant study (76% female; mean age: 44.84), we examined two ideas that are widespread among burnout researchers: (a) the idea that burnout is primarily related to occupational-level factors; and (b) the idea that burnout should be considered a sentinel indicator in research on negative occupational outcomes. We investigated the lin...

Objective. Several studies have demonstrated saccadic eye movement (SEM) abnormalities in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) when patients performed prosaccade (PS) and antisaccade (AS) tasks. Some studies have also showed that SEM abnormalities were correlated with dementia rating tests such as the MMSE. Therefore, it has been suggested that SEMs could prov...

The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the burnout syndrome, a condition initially described in psychology in the mid-1970s. We start by depicting the pioneering phase of burnout research that led to the introduction of the burnout construct in the scientific literature. We then describe the shift from initial exploratory and mainly q...

Burnout has been defined as a job-induced syndrome combining emotional exhaustion, depersonalization/cynicism, and a sense of reduced personal accomplishment. In this article, we expand on past analyses of burnout by reviewing key, yet overlooked, problems affecting the construct. We concomitantly examine the implications of these problems for the...

In this commentary, we discuss seldom-noticed methodological problems affecting biological research on burnout and depression and make recommendations to overcome the limitations of past studies conducted in this area. First, we suggest that identified subtypes of depression (e.g., depression with melancholic features and depression with atypical f...

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Depression researchers have long considered depressive disorders to be associated with specific cognitive processes. In the current chapter, we examine the relationship between depressive disorders (especially major depressive disorder [MDD]) and perceptual-cognitive processing of emotional contents. We describe some characteristics of depressive p...

To the Editor: Underwood and colleagues¹ published an article related to depression in new fathers. In their study, the authors assessed paternal antenatal depression symptoms (PADS) and paternal postnatal depression symptoms (PPDS). From their analyses, the authors drew conclusions about the first practical action to take, which would consist of “...

Purpose. This study aimed at: (a) documenting burnout-depression overlap; (b) introducing a method for assessing job-related depression; (c) examining the links between job-related depression, job (dis)satisfaction, and job-induced turnover intention (JITI). Design/Methodology. The study involved 286 female school employees from New Zealand. Depres...

Introduction. More than 40 years after the introduction of the construct in the literature, the status of “burnout” remains unclear. Whether burnout is anything other than a depressive syndrome has been increasingly discussed in recent years. Objectives. We examined the extent to which burnout can be considered distinct from depression. Methods....

The “burnout syndrome” has become popularly known since it was described in the 1970s and is today an emblem of work-related ill-health. Its phenomenological and nosological status, however, remains strongly debated. In this viewpoint article, we defend the controversial position that burnout is a depressive syndrome, based on theory-driven reasoni...

Although the relationship between age-related cognitive decline and saccadic eye movement (SEM) deficits has been outlined, specific cognitive alterations underlying age-related changes in saccadic performance remain unclear. This study attempted to better understand the nature of aging effects on SEMs. We compared SEMs in younger and older adults...

We examined the overlap of burnout with depression in a sample of 184 New Zealand schoolteachers. Burnout and depressive symptoms were strongly correlated with each other (r = .73; disattenuated correlation: .82) and moderately correlated with dysfunctional attitudes, ruminative responses, and pessimistic attributions. All the participants with hig...

Que ce soit dans la vie privée ou dans la vie professionnelle, les concepts employés pour décrire les états affectifs sont multiples : humeur, émotion, burnout, dépression, bipolarité. Les auteurs du présent ouvrage distinguent ces concepts et abordent les aspects théoriques et pratiques de l’humeur normale et de l’humeur pathologique. Ils présent...

http://www.deboecksuperieur.com/ouvrage/9782353273546-de-lhumeur-normale-la-depression-en-psychologie-cognitive-neurosciences-et

Les mouvements oculaires font partie de ces activités motrices réalisées quotidiennement et, généralement, sans en avoir conscience. Ils peuvent cependant être le reflet du fonctionnement cognitif et émotionnel, les rendant ainsi particulièrement intéressants pour l’étude des pathologies psychiatriques comme la dépression. Débutée il y a plusieurs...

Initialement décrit en psychologie dans les années 1970, le « syndrome du burnout » est demeuré difficile à caractériser. En particulier, la possibilité de distinguer le burnout des syndromes dépressifs, sous leurs formes cliniques et subcliniques, est restée controversée. Dans ce chapitre, nous présentons une analyse logique de la distinction burn...

A study was conducted in order to examine the emotional effects of content and hue interacting in the same image. To achieve this goal, self-reported (based on Self-Assessment Manikin [SAM] scale), physiological (pupil diameter and skin conductance response), and behavioral (eye movement) measures were used in response to a set of photographs selec...

Introduction. Burnout has been assumed to result from job stress. However, evidence for a causal relationship between job stress and burnout is limited. In the present study, we examined the extent to which job stress and global stress predicted burnout one year later. Method. A total of 249 French schoolteachers (mean age: 41; 71% female) took pa...

In the present article, we discuss (1) the importance of assessing and statistically considering both clinical and subclinical forms of depression when examining the relationship between neuroticism and short-term plasticity within the working memory neural network, and (2) the hypothesis of an antagonism between neuroticism and conscientiousness i...

Introduction: Slowing of information processing speed (IPS) is often considered one of the primary deficits seen in multiple sclerosis (MS). IPS is usually measured by tasks that involve many cognitive functions. The aim of this study was to determine whether similar IPS slowing can also be observed during two simple, timed, psychomotor crossing-o...

Background: The analysis of eye movements (EM) by eye-tracking has been carried out for several decades to investigate mood regulation, emotional information processing, and psychomotor disturbances in depressive disorders. Method: A systematic review of all English language PubMed articles using the terms “saccadic eye movements” OR “eye-tracking”...

OBJECTIVES: Burnout has been viewed as a phase in the development of depression. However, supportive research is scarce. We examined whether burnout predicted depression among French school teachers. METHODS: We conducted a 2-wave, 21-month study involving 627 teachers (73% female) working in French primary and secondary schools. Burnout was asses...

Emotional pictures are commonly used as visual stimuli in a number of research fields. Choosing relevant visual stimuli to induce emotion is fundamental in attachment and affective research. Attachment theory provides a theoretical basis for the understanding of emotional and relational problems, and is especially related to two specific emotions:...

The “burnout syndrome” has been defined as a combination of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment caused by chronic occupational stress. Although there has been increasing medical interest in burnout over the last decades, it is argued in this paper that the syndrome cannot be elevated to the status of diagnos...

Purpose. Whether burnout and depression represent distinct pathologies is unclear. The aim of this study was to examine whether burnout and depressive symptoms manifest themselves separately from each other or are so closely intertwined as to reflect the same phenomenon. Methods. A two-wave longitudinal study involving 627 French schoolteachers (7...

Introduction. Whether burnout is anything other than a (job-related) depressive syndrome is unclear. A growing body of research suggests that the overlap of burnout with depression has been largely underestimated. Objectives. The aim of this longitudinal study was to examine whether burnout at baseline helped predict depression at follow-up when de...

Introduction. It has been assumed that a key difference between burnout and depression is that burnout is job-related and situation-specific whereas depression is context-free and pervasive. This view has recently been challenged at a theoretical level and additional empirical investigation has been called for. Objectives. The aim of this study was...

Introduction Key to the distinctiveness of the burnout construct is the idea that burnout is etiologically anchored in the occupational context and mainly dependent on job-related factors. This idea, however, needs further empirical validation. Objectives The aim of the present study was to examine whether burnout is more strongly associated with c...

We examined whether interpersonal rejection sensitivity (IRS) – the hallmark of atypical depression – prospectively predicted burnout, controlling for baseline symptoms, history of depressive disorders, antidepressant intake, gender, age, and length of employment (mean between-assessment duration: 21 months; n = 578; 74% female). IRS was related to...

Burnout has become popularly known. There is a worrying discrepancy, however, between this popularity and the definitional clarity of the phenomenon. In our view, priority should be given to systematic clinical observation in order to clarify the nosological status of burnout and allow researchers to propose—if justified—sound diagnostic criteria f...

Whether burnout and depression cover the same psychopathology remains to be elucidated. To date, subtypes of depression have been overlooked in research on the burnout–depression overlap. Our aim was to estimate the prevalence of depressive disorders in workers with burnout while examining the overlap of burnout with the atypical subtype of depress...

Background. Burnout is usually defined as a combination of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment (RPA). Our aim was to examine the intertwining of burnout with anxiety and depression. Methods. This study included 5575 teachers. The Maslach Burnout Inventory was used to assess burnout. Depression was assessed...

The primary aim of this study was to characterize oculomotor performances in elderly depressed patients. The second aim was to investigate whether cognitive inhibition measured by the antisaccade task was associated with a psychomotor retardation or rather with a more specific cognitive-motor inhibition deficit. Twenty patients with a major depress...