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Some have suggested that people who join emergency-services professions have a unique set of personality and response characteristics that allow them to manage the intense stressors of their particular jobs. The nature of personality and response profiles of individuals from different emergency-services professions could have both clinical and policy implications. The present study examined self-reported personality traits of police and firefighter recruits, as well as their psychophysiological response patterns during a loud-tone procedure. Police recruits scored higher than firefighters on gregariousness, a facet of Extraversion, and on dutifulness and deliberation, facets of Conscientiousness. Compared to a normative sample, police and firefighters both scored higher on excitement-seeking, a facet of Extraversion. Comparisons with psychophysiological data from a non-rescuer sample suggest that the firefighter recruits exhibited higher heart rate and skin conductance (SC) levels, while police recruits showed larger eyeblink electromyogram (EMG) startle responses and required more trials to reach SC habituation criteria. |
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