Keep your eyes open: dispositional vigilance moderates the relationship between operational police stress and stress symptoms.

BACKGROUND: Vigilant coping is characterized by a deep processing of threat-related information. In many cases, vigilant coping increases stress symptoms, whereas avoidant coping decreases negative affect. However, vigilance may be beneficial when stress-eliciting situations involve a risk of injury or escalation as is usually the case in police operations.

DESIGN: We investigated the roles of vigilance and cognitive avoidance in police operations in a cross-sectional survey.

METHODS: The participants were 137 students (104 men, Mage  = 28.54, SD = 8.04) from the Federal University of Applied Administrative Sciences; 76 of them were already police officers (work experience: M = 12.59 years), and 61 were police officer candidates who had completed a 3- to 6-month police internship. Participants completed a paper-and-pencil survey and reported their operational stress, dispositional vigilance and cognitive avoidance in police operations, and stress symptoms.

RESULTS: We found that vigilance was negatively associated with stress symptoms and moderated the relationship between operational stress and stress symptoms. Cognitive avoidance, on the other hand, just missed the level of statistical significance in our test of whether it was positively associated with stress symptoms.

CONCLUSIONS: Our findings demonstrate that vigilance may protect against the negative consequences of stress in police operations.