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Psychosocial risks are defined by the International Labor Organization in terms of interactions between job content, work organization and management, and other environmental and organizational conditions, on one hand, and employee conditions, skills, and needs, on the other. Thus, psychosocial risks refer to those interactions that prove to have a dangerous influence on employees' health through their perceptions and experience. Long-term involvement in stressful work situations can lead to onset of burnout syndr...

In recent years, virtual reality developers have managed to create an artificial environment that can simulate reality so that the user has the impression of an almost real physical presence in the virtual world. By overlapping and synchronizing projected images with spatial sounds and even with forces that interact with the user, the user is detached from the real environment and an all-encompassing involvement in the virtual world occurs. Virtual reality is frequently present in aviation, medicine, military trai...

Despite all technical and technological advances, most industries are experiencing damage resulting in human casualties and property damage. Thus, the presence of special intervention and rescue teams at economic agent’s units is essential to limit / eliminate damage that generates toxic / explosive / flammable environments and rescue those caught in such events. The intervention activity in such special conditions can be carried out exclusively by trained and authorized personnel in this respect, personnel using ...

The nature of their work places intervention and rescue personnel at the top of professions that face a considerable number of occupational health and safety risks, which are sometimes unavoidable. Often, this occupational category does not face a single safety risk, but a complex combination of risk factors, including unpredictability of situations in which they are required to work. The growing issue of protecting emergency workers against occupational health and safety risks has been highlighted as a priority b...

Stress agents are only potentially stressful, generating psychological stress only under certain conditions, even if some of them are able of generating stress reactions in most individuals. Therefore, effects of stressors depend not only on their own characteristics but also on attributes of the subject receiving their action such as quality and breadth of emotional responses, adaptive strategies available and mobilized in the created interaction etc. Specific responses to a situation that potentially endangers l...

Both surface but especially underground rescue activities in industrial environments presenting risk of explosive / flammable or toxic gases, are difficult because of major risk of fires or explosions in a very short time. Dense smoke can make rescue work even more difficult and time becomes an extremely important factor, especially when workers are caught in the affected area and it is assumed that they could be alive. The technological development of last years has allowed the miniaturization of equipment and oc...

Vulnerability to stress occurs during the person's biography, depending on psycho-emotional trauma, experiences of severe psychological stressful situations, including how the individual succeeded in managing them. Some people have a constitutional or psychological vulnerability to the action of traditional stressors, being more prone to psychic stress. The multifactorial complex of non-specific factors that modulate the individual response necessarily includes personality traits, acquired during the individual's ...

Psychological research makes progress in associating personality traits with specific actions and behaviours, seeking individual differences in brain anatomy and physiology, in body functions and processes of self-regulation, sensation and perception, in information processing and thinking patterns, in behaviour and emotional regulation, in interpersonal interactions and many other psychological indicators. Depending on the characteristics of the work environment, various psychological indicators are involved in r...

When it comes to workplaces characterized by a high degree of hazard and liability, such as mine intervention and rescue in major risk environments the most important element is the convergence of the skills required by job and skills of the individual, this being the guarantee of successful vocational selection. Along with psychological selection, training / retraining and physical training in conditions as close as possible to the reality of future interventions, under the action of stress factors that cause neg...