Working on psychological flexibility to reduce stressand increase corporate wellbeing in correction officers of a prison in Italy Alessandra Chianese Silvia Cau Giovambattista Presti

Absence of wellness in the Italian prisons In Italy the deaths in prison is a hot issue Over the past 11 years prisoners died in prison, 1/3 of which committed suicide This created a lot of interest by the media, but there is still little interest regarding guards 70 prison guards committed suicide in recent years

Italian political initiative To prevent further suicides, the Italian Ministry of Justice, has decided to organize training courses on organizational well-being in all Italian prisons These guidelines do not give details on how to perform the training We decided to use this issue in order to prevent and recognize situations of stress and burn out. Reasons of this might be the suicides of colleagues: communication, organizational well- being and burn out.

Settings… We worked in three prisons: 1. Rebibbia new complex Subjects: approximately 140 in 6 sessions 2. Rebibbiathird house Subjects: 28 in 3 sessions 3. Regina Coeli Subjects: 31 in 2 sessions The training lasted a total of 3 days and techniques used were: indoor training education theater, outdoor training (only in Rebibbia prison), and the ACT training.

Rebibbia new complex (Nov – Mar. 2011) 6 sessions, each of which lasted 4 days First, second and fourth day: experiential training consisted of communication, conflict resolution, empathy, team building and wellbeing Third day: an ACT trainer worked on exercises, methaphors as well as mindfulness on acceptance, defusion, present moment, self and values After the training 30 people were selected for an ACT training in an outdoor setting and for 6 days of intensive communication training The goal of that work was to create an Organizational listening group that functions without the support of trainers

Rebibbiathird house (Sept.-Oct. 2010) 3 sessions, each of which lasted 2 days First day: experiential training focused on communication, empathy, team building and wellbeing Second day: an ACT trainer worked on exercises, methaphors as well as mindfulness on acceptance, defusion, present moment, self as a contest and values For the purpose of learing, some students acted like participants to learn how to observe ACT processes and behaviors as they were happening

Regina Coeli (Oct. 2010) 31 subjects, 2 sessions »Prison guards, educators, and directors Objective: to explore the possibility of applying an ACT protocol in a prison setting in Italy Duration of ACT protocol: 6 hours in the second day of training Mindfulness, metaphores and exercises on acceptance, commitment, self as a contest, present moment not values Measures: experiential avoidance (AAQ II), behaviors (HFDEI)

AAQII: measure of experiential avoidance Data for 22 subjects In both groups the mean differences of pre and post-training measures of experiential avoidance were not significative These results are fitting with those that show that changes in experiential avoidance do not happen immediately

HFDEI exaflex functional dimensional experiential interview Used as an observation tool of ACT processes by some observers 20 subjects data at t0 (pre-training), t1 (ACT day training), t2 (post-training) We calculated the average points assigned by observers on each processes: F Fisher test of each glm for acceptance (p0,000), commitment (p 0,000), defusion (p0,000), present moment(p 0,001) and self processes (p0,134) Behaviors changed (except self as a contest) in the post-training results

HDFEI Acceptance Process Abbreviated Anchors

Pre and post-training rate of behaviors (acceptance) This is an example of the rate of behavior trends at 1(pre- training), 2(ACT training), 3 (post- training) days. Commitment, present moment and defusion processes had the same trend

Weak points Minimal number of ACT training hours Training in the same setting where partecipants worked Pre and post-training evaluations were too close together to measure experiential avoidance Absence of a follow-up measure for experiential avoidance (AAQII) and observation (HFDEI)

Strong points First use of an ACT training in italian public administration Use psychological flexibility in an inflexible setting like prisons are Test an ACT protocol in work setting in Italy for the first time From the satisfaction evaluation, an interest to repeat this training in the future emerged Public administration allowed us to use scientific measures for future research

Future development Use the Organizational listening group of Rebibbia to apply the Regina Coeli protocol More ACT training instead of only 6 hours Training in a different setting Take follow-up measure for experiential avoidance (AAQ II) Take psychological wellbeing valid measure Refine observation (HFDEI) Measure ACT efficacy training in improve wellbeing

Well see you next year with the results!!