A meta-analysis on the crossover of workplace traumatic stress symptoms between partners

Workers who are exposed to severe situations such as death, harassment, and others' suffering at work are vulnerable to symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and severe distress. This distress may extend to their intimate partners, despite their lack of firsthand experience with the traumatic stressors. Although theory and empirical research suggest that employees' traumatic distress can transmit to their partners, the magnitude of these effects and when, how, and why intimate partners develop secondary traumatic symptoms and distress are not as clear. Drawing from crossover theory as an organizing framework (Westman, 2001), our meta-analysis of 276 articles indicates that the relationship between employee PTSD/distress and spouse PTSD/distress is as strong as the relationship between employee trauma exposure and employee PTSD/distress (ρ = .26), suggesting that workers' PTSD/distress is as distressing for partners as the traumatic stressors are for workers encountering them firsthand. Our moderation tests further revealed that the trauma-exposed workers' vulnerability to traumatic stress symptoms was stronger in military than in nonmilitary settings, whereas the extent to which their symptoms crossover to their intimate partners did not vary across occupations. Mediation tests suggest that traumatic stress crossover is partially explained by the worsened quality of the couple's relationship (e.g., increased social support burden and undermining), consistent with the crossover via couple interaction explanation in crossover theory. On the other hand, there was mixed support for the mediating role of the partner's empathy, indicating further research and clarification are needed. Implications for crossover theory and practice are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).