Resilience of psychology students as a factor in preventing professional burnout during war

The Ukrainian system of psychological assistance faces the threat of losing an entire generation of specialists because of professional burnout in the active phase of the military conflict. Researchers identified resilience as a key buffer between traumatic stress and professional self-preservation. The aim of the study was to provide a thorough theoretical and empirical justification of psychological resilience as a factor in preventing professional burnout in psychology students. The study involved 320 students of master’s programmes in psychology from different Ukrainian higher education institutions. The study employed standardized psychometric tools: the Resilience Scale, the Burnout Inventory, the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, and the Traumatic Exposure Severity Scale. All techniques were adapted and showed satisfactory reliability rates. The study found that resilience was a significant mediator between traumatic exposure and burnout. There was a strong negative correlation between resilience and burnout. The targeted resilience programme yielded statistically significant improvements in the experimental group with a large effect size. The results confirm the key role of resilience as a buffer against burnout in wartime, while revealing its limited protective effectiveness under extremely intense stress. The identification of three resilience profiles and the identification of emotional regulation as the most powerful component justify the need for differentiated educational interventions. Therefore, the integration of targeted resilience development into the training of psychology students is critical for maintaining the human resource potential of the psychological service. The effectiveness of targeted development of psychological resilience, in particular its key component –emotional regulation, is empirically confirmed. It is a critically important factor in preventing professional burnout among psychology students studying in wartime, which helps to preserve the human resource potential of the psychological service.