DOI: 10.1007/s11218-005-0663-8 Social Psychology of Education (2005) 8:425–439 © Springer 2005 Constructive thinking and burnout among secondary school teachers WILL EVERS, WELKO TOMIC ∗ and ANDR ´ E BROUWERS Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University, P.O. Box 2960, NL-6401 DL Heerlen, The Netherlands (Received 7 December 2004; Accepted in final form 5 July 2005) Abstract. The present study investigated the relationship between Epstein’s (1998, Con- structive thinking: The key to emotional intelligence. London: Praeger publisher.) com- ponents of constructive thinking and burnout as experienced by a sample of Dutch secondary school teachers. A postal questionnaire was sent to teachers from randomly selected secondary schools. The response rate was 54.1%(N = 433). Four components of constructive thinking significantly contributed to the explained variance in emotional exhaustion (17%), depersonalization (21%), and personal accomplishment (20%). The results of the study suggest that secondary school teachers’ maladaptive thinking processes prevent them from rational thinking during their work, which significantly contributes to the onset of burnout. Burnout intervention programs for teachers are likely to be more effective when the participator’s maladaptive thinking system is taken into consideration. This stems from the idea that personality factors are a probably easier point of departure to tackle burnout symptoms than organizational factors. Key words: burnout; constructive thinking; secondary school teachers 1. Introduction 1.1. BURNOUT Burnout is a syndrome that has been mainly observed in individuals whose professional demands include both a high sense of ideals and a high degree of interaction with other people, for instance teachers and medical personnel. Burnout is divided in three dimensions, emotional exhaustion, depersonal- ization, and reduced personal accomplishment. Characteristic for emotional exhaustion is for instance the feeling of being emotionally drained by work, or used up at the end of almost every workday. Depersonalization is char- acterized by feelings of callousness towards other people. Finally, burned out individuals suffer from a reduced sense of personal accomplishment, or the feeling that one is dealing less effectively with problems as well as with ⋆ Author for correspondence: Tel.:+345-5762539; Fax: +3145-5762939; e-mail: Welko.Tomic@ou.nl.