Patterns of Eeg Coherence Associated with Emotional Burnout

Abstract

One of the main problems is evaluation of the influence of emotiongenic factors in everyday life and interpersonal communication on an individual. Burnout is a mechanism of psychological defense, which is responsible for partial or total loss of emotions in response to stressful situations during interpersonal communication. The changes of functional connectivity between different regions of brain in the rest state depends on the current level of brain activation, which, in turn, depends on the initial emotional state. The development of emotional burnout is characterized by decrease of information capacity of the brain: reduction of spatial synchronization provides delayed and less efficient spread of excitation in the cerebral cortex. The decrease of interhemispheric coherence of low and high-frequency components of EEG may indicate the increase of level of differentiation of neuronal groups. In women, decrease of coherence in theta-subband indicates the influence of burnout on attention concentration, working memory, and emotional processes. In men weakening of the relationship between left frontal and right occipital zones indicates the weakness of informational aggregation, reducing readiness of the neural centers for processing information in the “cognitive axis”. Reduction of the level of coherence of alpha band may indicate problems of psychological adaptation within the experiment in examined groups of men with the Resistance stage of burnout. These EEG features allow us to conclude that participants with Resistance stage were concentrated on negative emotional reactions. Study indicates that men are more vulnerable to stress-induced conditions, which lead to burnout.

Disclosure of interest

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.