Work-related psychological health among clergy serving in the Presbyterian Church (USA) : testing the idea of balanced affect

Drawing on the classic model of balanced affect, the Francis Burnout Inventory (FBI) conceptualises good work-related psychological health among clergy in terms of negative affect being balanced by positive affect. In a random sample of 744 clergy (539 clergymen and 205 clergywomen) serving in The Presbyterian Church (USA), negative affect was assessed by the Scale of Emotional Exhaustion in Ministry (SEEM) and positive affect was assessed by the Satisfaction in Ministry Scale (SIMS). At the same time, burnout was independently assessed using self-report measures of overall health and burnout, and by the extraversion and neuroticism scales of Eysenck’s dimensional model of personality. These independent measures of burnout indicated higher burnout among those who were emotionally exhausted and lower burnout among those who had high levels of satisfaction with their ministry. Crucially for proving the idea of balanced affect, there was a significant interaction between the effects of SEEM and SIMS scores on these independent measures of burnout, showing that the mitigating effects of positive affect on burnout increased with increasing levels of negative affect

Direct linking of microbial populations to specific biogeochemical processes by 13C-labelling of biomarkers

Recent advances in the application of molecular genetic approaches have emphasized our potentially huge underestimate of microbial diversity in a range of natural environments(1). These approaches, however, give no direct information about the biogeochemical processes in which microorganisms are active(2). Here we describe an approach to directly link specific environmental microbial processes with the organisms involved, based on the stable-carbon-isotope labelling of individual lipid biomarkers. We demonstrate this approach in aquatic sediments and provide evidence for the identity of the bacteria involved in two important biogeochemical processes: sulphate reduction coupled to acetate oxidation in estuarine and brackish sediments(3,4), and methane oxidation in a freshwater sediment(5). Our results suggest that acetate added in a C-13- labelled form was predominantly consumed by sulphate-reducing bacteria similar to the Gram-positive Desulfotomaculum acetoxidans and not by a population of the more widely studied Gram-negative Desulfobacter spp. Furthermore, C-13-methane labelling experiments suggest that type I methanotrophic bacteria dominate methane oxidation at the freshwater site. [KEYWORDS: Sulfate-reducing bacteria; gradient gel-electrophoresis; fatty-acid profiles; ribosomal-rna; methanotrophic bacteria; estuarine sediments; marine-sediments; sp-nov; acetate; desulfovibrio]