Hindrance versus Challenge Appraisals: Data from Belgium and Iran

Neuropsylab NUG seminar took place on 21 of May.  Speaker is a member of NUG project “Brain responses to mathematical operations of increasing complexity”; Morteza Charkhabi, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Psychology. He told about his study on "Hindrance versus Challenge Appraisals: Data from Belgium and Iran".

The aim of this study was to determine the extent to which hindrance and challenge appraisals of insecurity feeling may amplify or buffer the link between insecurity feeling and well-being-related outcomes. Based on cognitive appraisal theory, we predicted a hindrance appraisal of insecurity feeling to amplify and a challenge appraisal of insecurity feeling to buffer the association between insecurity feeling and well-being-related outcomes. We used a 2-country study with a sample size of 654 employees from Belgium (N = 348) and Iran (N = 306). Hypotheses were tested using the total sample and the two separate samples respectively. Results indicated that hindrance appraisals amplified the association between insecurity feeling and emotional exhaustion in the total and Belgian samples. Challenge appraisals did not moderate the insecurity-well-being association in both countries. As a conclusion, cognitive appraisals of perceived insecurity thus hardly influence the association between insecurity feeling and well-being-related outcomes.