Search

There is a growing interest in developing resilience-building programs in the work context. Yet the resilience literature provides no clear answer about what constitutes such a program. The aim of this article is to shed light on this question by presenting a set of criteria for resilience-building programs. We developed these criteria by systematically reviewing studies that synthesized the evidence about the definition, conceptualization, measurement, and enhancement of psychological resilience. A literature search in peer-review journals published between 2009 and 2018 using PsycINFO resulted in 286 hits. Twenty-one studies met our inclusion criteria. In addition, we consulted 3 handbooks on resilience. The result of our review is a checklist of 12 criteria for resilience-building programs to improve program consistency and quality. These criteria address the necessity to: specify which working population is in need of psychological resilience; cite which definition is being used; display and explain the process that people go through in order to adapt to adversity; describe how resilience will be measured and enhanced as a dynamic process, as well as say which type of positive adaptation-to which adversity, in which work context, and when-is involved; and make clear the starting point and purpose of the work. These criteria can be regarded as a valuable navigation tool in the complex field of resilience: Program developers can use them to optimize the content of resilience-building programs and to ensure that relevant information is reported; reviewers of resilience-building programs can use them to analyze, evaluate, and compare programs. Therefore, the checklist could become an indispensable tool for both researchers and practitioners to improve designing, describing, and reviewing resilience-building programs at work.

For many professions, the ability to communicate (vocally) is an essential skill. Training, for instance, professional-client communication is labour intensive however, as it often involves one-on-one interactions with a skilled trainer or actor. To improve teaching communication, a virtual simulator called Communicate! was developed by Utrecht University1. In Communicate!, a student plays a scenario and holds a consultation with a virtual character. Teachers can build scenarios and apply specific scenarios to be used as practice for students or even as assessment method. We wondered if the use of Communicate! can be an effective aid to study communication skills in several operationalisations of learning outcomes. For this abstract we focus on acquiring theoretical knowledge about communication techniques.We devised two experiments (n = 128 and 133, a year apart) where the use of Communicate! was compared to more traditional learning tools, such as literature study and a lecture, in an undergraduate psychology communication-skills course. In both experiments (optional for the students in the course) we used a randomised controlled trial approach. Students in the course were divided in four groups, two of which both read an article about giving bad news in a dialogue and played a bad-news-dialogue-scenario (but in different order), while the third group only played the scenario. In the first experiment the final group only read the article, in the second experiment the final group read the article and listened to a lecture on bad news dialogues. The outcome measure we present here was performance on a multiple-choice test (about the theoretical underpinnings of this type of dialogue) administered at the end of the session.In both experiments playing both the scenario and reading the article resulted in better performance on the multiple-choice test (on communication skills) than reading the article alone, an effect mimicked by replacing the scenario by the lecture. This is surprising, given that Communicate! was designed for practising skills, not acquiring theoretical knowledge.Our results show that educational interventions such as the one presented here can have unexpected effects on student learning, a phenomenon worth considering when evaluating the effects of such educational innovations.

Communicate! is a serious game for practicing communication skills. It supports practicing interpersonal communication skills between a health care professional such as a doctor or a pharmacist, or a (business) psychologist, and a patient or client. A player selects a scenario, and holds a consultation with a virtual character. In the consultation, the player chooses between the various options offered in the scenario. The player scores on the learning goals addressed by the scenario, and gets immediate feedback through the effect of the choice between the answer options on the utterance and emotion of the virtual character. Communicate! also offers an editor for scenarios. A scenario is a graph-like structure, extended with several constructs to avoid the development of repetitive structures. We have performed several experiments with Communicate!, both with students to evaluate the use of Communicate! in various programs at Utrecht University, and with teachers to evaluate the development of scenarios for Communicate!