Workers’ psychological distress, depression, and burnout symptoms: associations with diurnal cortisol profiles
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: This study investigated whether self-reported psychological distress and depressive and burnout symptoms were associated with cortisol concentrations among workers. METHODS: Day-shift workers (N=401) employed in 34 diverse workplaces in Canada participated. We administered well-validated questionnaires and collected salivary cortisol concentrations at five time points (awakening, 30 minutes after awakening, 14:00 hours, 16:00 hours, and bedtime) repeated three times a week (Saturday, Tuesday, Thursday) to capture work and non-workday variation. Multilevel regressions models estimated cortisol concentrations at different levels according to time of day, workers, and workplaces. RESULTS: After controlling for awakening time, sex, age, season of sampling, alcohol use, physical activity, psychotropic drugs use, health conditions, and body mass index, results revealed significant associations between psychological distress and depressive and burnout symptoms in relation to cortisol concentrations at different diurnal time points. Specifically, higher levels of psychological distress and depressive symptoms were associated with higher cortisol concentrations at awakening but not 30 minutes afterwards. Starting steadily from 14:00 hours until bedtime, levels of psychological distress and depressive and burnout symptoms were associated with lower cortisol concentrations. Significant cortisol variations were also found between workplaces. Sex did not moderate associations in secondary analyses. CONCLUSIONS: Distinct time points of diurnal cortisol variation were consistently, albeit modestly, associated with increased psychological distress and depressive and burnout symptoms. Our findings therefore link subjective psychometrics with objective biometrics. This research area could potentially lead to the development of refined screening tools that provide correspondence between diurnal cortisol and mental health.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".