Personality Factors Impacting Sense of Stress of People Working in Difficult and Dangerous Professions

Abstract

Demanding and dangerous professions include those professions and job positions that require extraordinary psychophysical abilities and pose a health and/or safety risk to the person performing the tasks and/or others. Examples of such jobs are, i.a., military pilots and firefighters. Health and safety risks, combined with stress and a sense of psychophysical fatigue are not unusual. It is interesting to explore the relation between the stress levels of military pilots and firefighters and their individual character traits. My research shows that firefighters experience higher levels of psychophysical fatigue than military pilots. Firefighters are more often exposed to difficult, sometimes even traumatic situations, when saving people from fires or pulling them out of destroyed vehicles. Military pilots experience these situations rarely only in special cases,such as aircraft malfunctions, temporary loss of spatial orientation, etc.