Work-related stress and cognitive enhancement among university teachers

Abstract

Background: Working conditions of academic staff have become increasingly complex and occupational exposure has risen. This study investigates whether work-related stress is associated with the use of prescription drugs for cognitive enhancement (CE). Methods: The study was designed around three web-based surveys (n₁ = 1131; n₂ = 936; n₃ = 906) to which university teachers at four German universities were asked to respond. It assessed past CE-drug use and the willingness to use CE-drugs as factors influencing future use. Overlap among participants across the surveys allowed for analyses of stability of the results across time. Results: Our study suggests a currently very low prevalence of CE-drug use as well as a low willingness to use such drugs. The results showed a strong association between perceptions of work-related stress and all measures of CE-drug use (when controlling for potential confounding factors). They also showed that past use of CE-drugs increased participants' willingness to use them again in the future, as did lower levels of social support. Two different measures showed that participants' moral qualms against the use of CE-drugs decreased their probability of using them. Conclusions: The results increase our knowledge about the prevalence of CE-drug use and our understanding of what motivates and inhibits the use of CE-drug.

Keywords:

• work-related stress
• cognitive enhancement
• non-medical use of prescription drugs
• moral perceptions
• social support
• drug instrumentalization

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all the people who helped to conduct this study, especially Dominik Koch, Ines Meyer, Andrea Schulze, Floris van Veen, and Sebastian Willen. We thank Olaf von dem Knesebeck for critical comments as well as Siegwart Lindenberg for his discussion of our application of his moral perception measure. Furthermore, we also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. The FMER did not influence any interpretations or force the research team to produce biased results. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the policies of the funder. The authors did not receive any research support from public or private actors in the pharmaceutical sector.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

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Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research [FMER; 01PH08024], headed by Sebastian Sattler and Martin Diewald). Sebastian Sattler's research was supported by the Rectorate Fellowship of the Bielefeld University and by a PostDoc Fellowship [Az. 20.13.0.161] of the Fritz-Thyssen-Foundation and the Cologne Graduate School in Management, Economics, and Social Sciences.