Abstract for:Stress Dynamics- A Psychological Study in Police Officers

Humans experience stress when they do not have sufficient energy level for coping with obstacles or demands. Stress leads an individual to experience anxiety, negative emotions, discomfort, etc. Policing is one such stressful occupation where the employees get exposed to more personal as well as occupational demand than employees in other sectors. Higher values of stress throughout a day's job lead to emotional, physiological, behavioral, and psychological instability.

This paper introduces a system dynamics model prepared to study the effect of psychological factors leading to stress in a high demanding work condition that police officers usually encounter. The various factors taken into consideration that lead to stress are anxiety, heart rate, energy level, comfort, demand, and response rate. The empirical relation between the selected variables and stress was established with the help of primary data collection conducted among selected police officers.

The causal relationships between the variables are represented  with the help of causal loop diagram. The corresponding stock and flow diagram have been prepared and the model behavior have been compared against the observed behavior. The model performance has been validated with respect to the level of stress that police officers experience during their duty hours.