Metacognitive awareness and psychological endurance in the professional development of intelligence officers

Development of metacognitive awareness and psychological endurance is particularly important for the effective performance of military intelligence officers working in conditions of uncertainty, stress, and high responsibility. The purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship between metacognitive awareness, psychological endurance, and generalised anxiety, and to identify differences in these characteristics between future and serving military intelligence officers. The study involved 229 participants, including 67 future intelligence officers with no professional experience and 162 active intelligence officers with service experience. Statistical analysis was performed using the Student’s t-test for independent samples and Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient in the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) 29. The study found that serving intelligence officers showed significantly lower levels of generalised anxiety than future intelligence officers, while no statistically significant differences in psychological endurance were found between the groups. Serving officers were found to have significantly higher overall metacognitive awareness and higher levels of procedural knowledge, conditional knowledge, information management strategies, and training assessment compared to future officers. Correlation analysis showed that overall metacognitive awareness was moderately negatively associated with generalised anxiety (r = -0.33, p < 0.001) and moderately positively associated with psychological stability (r = 0.38, p < 0.001). Analysis of individual components of metacognitive awareness showed that procedural knowledge, information management strategies, and debugging strategies had the strongest positive associations with psychological endurance, while most metacognitive components were negatively associated with generalised anxiety; however, metacognitive monitoring was not significantly associated with generalised anxiety. The results of the study can be used in the psychological and professional training of future military intelligence officers to develop metacognitive skills related to information analysis, strategic decision-making, metacognitive monitoring, and assessment of professional activity