Pint of Postdoc Speaker Recap - Dr. Konstantinos Papazoglou

“The Role of Moral Injury and Compassion fatigue in Police Work”

Dr. Konstantinos Papazoglou

Edited by:

Jennifer Blackburn (assisted by Aileen Fernandez)

Abstract:

Konstantinos Papazoglou’s work spans from collaborating with the New Haven Police Department to provide services to community members exposed to violent crimes and overall trauma, to now serving as the director of the POWER Institute, which focuses on law enforcement research. For our August 2020 Pint of Postdoc series, he shared his work focusing on how moral injury and negative personality traits contribute towards compassion fatigue and Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in police officers. By amassing a large database of police contacts in the US, Canada, and Europe he was able to carry out several studies to explore this. The first looked at the association between authoritarianism and compassion fatigue/ compassion satisfaction among police officers, and how factors such as years of experience shape these attitudes. Second, he examined the relationship between Dark Triad personality traits with compassion fatigue and satisfaction among police officers by measuring the prevalence of compassion fatigue, compassion satisfaction, and negative personality traits and how all of these can predict compassion fatigue. Lastly, he looked at the relationship between moral injury, compassion fatigue, compassion satisfaction, and PTSD, examining if the relative difference in moral injury exists (“self- vs. others-focused”) based on officers’ levels of dark triad personality traits and measured if moral injury, dark triad personality traits, and compassion satisfaction could predict compassion fatigue and PTSD. 

Across all studies, he found that compassion satisfaction was significantly negatively

correlated with compassion fatigue and that compassion fatigue was significantly positively

associated with negative personality traits.