On stress, competently

On the YouTube channel of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, in the programme «About Science. Competently», its presenter – Academician of the NAS of Ukraine Volodymyr Semynozhenko – conducted an interesting, informal interview with the well-known Ukrainian scholar, head of the Department of Social Psychology of the Institute of Sociology of the NAS of Ukraine, Doctor of Sociological Sciences Olena Zlobina.

The distinguished sociologist described the findings of the Institute's nationwide survey “States of stress among the population of Ukraine in the context of the war”, in particular the stressors of wartime, the resources for countering stress available to Ukraine's population, states of stress under war conditions and their consequences for Ukrainians' everyday life.

Recalling such a stressor as the Chornobyl disaster, Zlobina noted that, according to the Institute's monitoring data over the past 30 years, the perception of that accident as a stressor has fallen tenfold – to 4.7. As for the traumatising consequences of Russia's current war of aggression against Ukraine, the researcher believes that overcoming this stress effect on Ukrainians will take at least a generation, though views are expressed that it will take more than one.

Answering the presenter's questions, Zlobina predicted that in the near term she does not expect any radical worsening of the situation, and noted that Ukrainians have a powerful resource of psychological resilience to stress – and this is confirmed by the research of the Institute of Sociology of the NAS of Ukraine and of other research centres.