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How should researchers navigate and interpret the moral emotions evoked in them in research on trauma? In this reflective essay, the authors discuss their experience as researchers on moral injury (MI) in veterans and police personnel in the Netherlands. Stories of MI usually do not allow for a clear-cut categorization of the affected person as a victim or perpetrator. This ambivalence, in fact, is explicitly part of the concept of MI. It means however that researchers face complicated psychological, ethical and methodological challenges during research on MI.

The authors contemplate these challenges by describing two empirical cases demonstrating the particular moral challenges that emerge in MI research. Drawing from literature on qualitative research and emotions, the authors distil different perspectives on the role of moral emotions in research.

Reflecting on the ambivalent and difficult emotions the authors experienced as researchers when listening to personal accounts of moral injury, the authors offer insights into the necessity and delicacy of navigating between the methodological potential and the ethical and psychological risks of such emotions.

This study is relevant for all researchers examining trauma, in particular when the research is surrounded by complex ethical questions. While the issue of managing emotions in research on trauma is challenging in itself, it is further complicated when the stories related by respondents challenge the researcher's own moral beliefs and values.

Crisis services personnel are frequently deployed around the globe under highly demanding conditions. This raises the need to better understand the deployment process and more especially, sustainable reintegration after deployment. Despite recent research efforts, the study of the post-deployment stage, more specifically the reintegration process, remains fragmented and limited. To address these limitations, this review aims at (1) describing how reintegration is conceptualised and measured in the existing literature, (2) identifying what dimensions are associated with the reintegration process and (3) identifying what we know about the process of reintegration in terms of timing and phases.

Following the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) protocol, the authors identified 5,859 documents across several scientific databases published between 1995 and 2021. Based on predefined eligibility criteria, 104 documents were yielded.

Research has primarily focused on descriptive studies of negative individual and interpersonal outcomes after deployment. However, this review indicates that reintegration is dynamic, multi-sector, multidimensional and dual. Each of its phases and dimensions is associated with distinct challenges.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research that investigates reintegration among different crisis services and provides an integrative social-ecological framework that identifies the different dimensions and challenges of this process.

Current Army doctrine stresses a need for military leaders to have the capability to make flexible and adaptive decisions based on a future unknown environment, location and enemy. To assess a military decision maker’s ability in this context, this paper aims to modify the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test which assesses cognitive flexibility, into a military relevant map task. Thirty-four military officers from all service branches completed the map task.

The purpose of this study was to modify a current psychological task that measures cognitive flexibility into a military relevant task that includes the challenge of overcoming experiential bias, and understand underlying causes of individual variability in the decision-making and cognitive flexibility behavior of active duty military officers on this task.

Results indicated that non-perseverative errors were a strong predictor of cognitive flexibility performance on the map task. Decomposition of non-perseverative error into efficient errors and random errors revealed that participants who did not complete the map task changed their sorting strategy too soon within a series, resulting in a high quantity of random errors.

This study serves as the first step in customizing cognitive psychological tests for a military purpose and understanding why some military participants show poor cognitive flexibility.