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egulating subsystem (SRS) it stabilizes the approaching, monitoring, creating, and<br />

executing aspects of a person in a way that it regulates those feelings that stands in the way of<br />

carrying out those actions which have been planned. For a person to be able to self-regulate in<br />

an effective way, he/she needs to control the approaching, monitoring, creating, and executing<br />

behaviours as much as possible, and regulate them as much as they are required to.<br />

According to Olah (2005) the psychological immune system can be related to burnout in that<br />

people who are experiencing burnout should report low scores on most of the scales of the<br />

Psychological Immune Competence Inventory (PICI) (op. cit.). Thus, low burnout should be<br />

related to high levels on the self-regulating subsystem and with positive monitoring.<br />

When it comes to the area of connecting burnout to personality, this dissertation is unique<br />

since it is using the psychological immune system as the personality dimension. It is offering<br />

a new approach in the study of burnout by looking at the 16 different personality components<br />

and the three personality subsystems related to psychological immunity in Swedish and<br />

Hungarian emergency nurses. By doing so this dissertation is offering a new explanation of a<br />

possible protective personality factor in the study of burnout. Since no previous research has<br />

been found in connection to the psychological immune system when comparing Swedish and<br />

Hungarian emergency nurses’ burnout levels, this dissertation is contributing with a new<br />

direction to the existing burnout literature and research.<br />

2.9. SOCIAL SUPPORT<br />

2.9.1. Social support related to health<br />

Karasek & Theorell (1990, in Bradley & Cartwright, 2002) looked into to the area of health<br />

and psychological demands, in their demand-control model. They argued that increased levels<br />

of psychological demands together with decreased levels of opportunities to make decisions<br />

can be connected to poor health outcomes. Johnson & Hall (1988) also agreed with this<br />

assumption of Karasek & Theorell’s model (op. cit.) however, they included social support<br />

into the model and named it demand-control-support model. According to these researchers<br />

the social support in the expanded model is standing for a general helpful collegial social<br />

interaction with supervisors and colleagues. Also Rose, Ahuja & Jones (2006) argued for a

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