Background. Social and organisational changes in businesses have led to the appearance of “emergent risks” which affect workers but are less evident and hard to quantify such as psychosocial risks. Linked to psychosocial risks, issues such as work-related stress and workplace violence are major challenges to occupational health and safety. This paper analyses the trends in the concerns expressed by wage-earners in Spain regarding psychosocial factors that may affect them in the workplace. Methods. A causal analysis based on the application of binary logistic regression is presented, covering certain social and occupational characteristics of survey respondents and the psychosocial factors included in the Spanish National Surveys of Working Conditions for 2007 and for 2011-2012. Binary logistic regression is a multivariate statistical tool that serves as a classification technique, identifying the variables that affect the probability of the event to be studied (dichotomous variable). This technique has the advantage that it does not require that the explanatory variables follow a normal distribution. The aim is to estimate the influence of the explanatory variables on the probability of the occurrence of the event under study, represented by the explained variable. Results. During the economic crisis of 2008, workers became more concerned about losing their jobs and about factors related to personnel cutbacks and decreases in investment in the prevention of occupational risks. Downsizing due to the crisis led to increased workloads for many of those still in work. Thus, in 2011, the likelihood of workers being concerned about working hours was greater, especially among respondents aged 25–34 and those working in commerce and transport. Workload was found to be a particular concern among respondents aged 25–34 and among workers in transport, communication, financial, professional, and administrative activities; health-related activities; and industry. Conclusions. Policy should also be directed towards improving the structural aspects of psychosocial variations, in terms of work conditions, employment protection, and employment security to protect workers against income fluctuations as a result of job loss.