Lecture
Crisis event - this is a concept in crisis psychology that denotes an event or situation that may cause significant psychological stress, emotional upheaval, and require adaptation or a response on the part of a person or group of people. Crisis events can be of various kinds and scales, and they may include the following types of events:
Natural disasters: For example, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, fires, and other natural calamities that can lead to destruction, loss of property, and threaten life.
Technological (man-made) accidents: These are events related to accidents at hazardous industrial facilities, explosions, leaks of hazardous substances, and other technical disasters.
Social crises: These include mass unrest, terrorist acts, military conflicts, and other events that create a danger to the safety and stability of society.
Personal crises: These are crises experienced at the individual level, such as the loss of a loved one, divorce, job loss, serious illness, or injury.
Health-related crises: These may include diagnoses of severe illnesses, pandemics, or medical crises that have an impact on people’s health and well-being.
Economic crises: Related to financial difficulties, loss of funds, jobs, and other financial aspects that can cause stress and uncertainty.
Individual (emotional) crises: These include emotional and psychological crises, such as depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts and actions.
Analysis of the concepts “crisis”, “extreme situation”, “event”,
“crisis event”.
The concept «Crisis» (from the Greek krisis - decision, turning point, outcome)
- a turning point, a difficult transitional state, an exacerbation, a dangerous
unstable condition. Science distinguishes medical crises,
agrarian, stock-market, currency, monetary and credit, financial,
overproduction, and colonial-system crises.
In Chinese, the concept of crisis is defined as a «dangerous
opportunity», as a chance for the growth of the human personality, which
an individual acquires by passing through a state of psychic crisis and
experiencing various forms of resistance.
A crisis is a situation of emotional and
mental stress requiring a significant change
in one’s conceptions of the world and of oneself within a short period of time.
Such a revision of one’s conceptions often entails
changes in the structure of the personality. These changes can be
either positive or negative in nature. By definition, a personality
that is in crisis cannot remain the same; in other words,
it fails to make sense of its current psychologically traumatic experience,
operating with familiar, stereotyped categories, or to use
simple, habitual models of adaptation.
Gordon W. Allport
We perceive the word crisis as a kind of warning:
something must be done before something worse happens.
We proceed from the premise that a crisis situation contains danger.
Consequently, it should be avoided, eliminated, prevented, and, moreover,
concealed. Undoubtedly, psychological crises can carry a threat within them.
Many of the reactions observed in connection with crises - a tendency toward
self-isolation or frenzied activity - represents an attempt
to overcome the situation. Such types of reaction can be adaptive. Moreover,
the desire to isolate oneself should not be confused, for example, with depression, just as
the urge to wander restlessly in a crisis situation should not be mistaken for
a controlled manic state.
The danger does not always lie in the crisis itself, but rather in the fact that we
have missed the chance. A crisis can entail growth and maturation. In
a psychological crisis, two sides can be distinguished: a danger to
personal growth and a potential for personal growth.
The concept of "event". In Dahl’s Explanatory Dictionary, it is defined
as follows: "Event, the eventfulness of someone with someone, something with something,
being together at one and the same time; the eventfulness of occurrences,
compatibility in time". A closely related interpretation of this
concept is given by V.I. Slobodchikov and E.I. Isaev. They identify in this
concept two key features: "joint" and "other". Hence
the definition of the concept. "Co-being is a living community, an interweaving and
interconnection of two or more lives, their inner unity combined with an external
unique, internally contradictory, living community of two people".
In terms of "event" and "crisis" we distinguish the following
essential features: a dangerous transitional state (in the term "crisis")
and the eventfulness of occurrences, compatibility in time (in the term
"event"). Thus, the state of danger that is joint in time is the essence
of the content of the concept "crisis event".
Two concepts: crisis and event. In the concept we are defining,
"crisis event" the system-forming element is "undesirable
phenomenon". This characteristic makes the crisis phenomenon dependent on
personal evaluation and personal perception. The undesirability of the crisis
event is determined by the fact that it is dangerous ("joint danger" - the second
system-forming element of this concept) for the life activity
of the person. This may be a threat to their health, material
well-being, social status, or intrapersonal equilibrium.
These two characteristics of the concept "crisis event" - "joint
danger" and "undesirability" - reveal the system of features contained
in the content of this concept.
Let us identify the following main features of the concept being sought:
the abruptness of the event’s onset; a content of the event that exceeds the norm for the given person,
for the given situation; the emergence
of an intrapersonal, interpersonal, or intergroup conflict,
requiring prompt resolution, combined with the person’s lack of experience
in resolving a conflict of this level; dynamic, progressive
changes in the situation, in the conditions of life activity, in social roles;
the complication of processes of life activity in connection with the appearance of previously
unknown elements, having no analogues in the person’s experience, of indeterminate
life activity; the transition of the situation into a phase of instability, reaching
the limits of the person’s adaptive resources.
In analyzing and defining the essence of a crisis event, one can
distinguish five approaches, successively five different variants
of examining this category:
For us, the first two are of paramount importance. At the everyday
level, a crisis event is characterized in the following terms of common
sense. A crisis-type event for the "naive" person, the man off the
street, will be any complication of the circumstances of their life activity; this
complication is extraordinary in nature, it is unexpected, and therefore
spontaneous and unforeseen. This event carries a threat, a danger to
physical and mental health. Thus, common sense
identifies the parameters of extraordinariness, spontaneity, and danger, which are
used to characterize a crisis event.
Psychological analysis draws attention to the following parameters
of a crisis event: 1) unfavorable conditions for life activity;
2) the event has a threatening character; 3) a sharp increase
in intrapersonal tension; 4) exhaustion of adaptive resources and
a "breakthrough" of the adaptive barrier; 5) a change in the dynamic stereotypes
of behavior; 6) a crisis state of the personality.
Coordinates for describing the concept of «crisis event».
For describing individual development, there exist in contemporary
psychological science three main terms: "lifetime", "life
cycle", and "life path". A characterization of these categories, describing
individual development, is given by I.S. Kon. Let us agree with the scholar that the most
capacious and commonly used contemporary scientific term for describing
this phenomenon is — "life path". In defining the term
"life path", special attention is given to the concept of "event". The importance
of this concept is explained, above all, by the shortcomings of that psychology
which studied the processes of individual development as if these
processes took place in an unchanging social world. The limitations
of such an approach are especially evident when it is necessary to answer
the question of how the process of an individual’s development occurs, when it is necessary
to study the individual in a changing world in which events occur
that not infrequently bear a crisis character. The concept of "age-related crises"
was developed in developmental psychology. The word "crisis" emphasizes the moment
of disturbance of equilibrium, the emergence of new needs, and the restructuring
of the personality’s motivational sphere. But since at this phase of development such a
state is statistically normal, these crises are therefore called
"normative".
This approach worked and justified itself as long as we
were interested in the structure of the life path of the average
individual. Essentially, we were not interested in the individual person. But as soon as
we approach the biography of an individual personality, the so-called
objective data need to be supplemented with subjective data. Periodization in
this case is constructed according to those events that became turning
milestones in the development of the personality and its life-world, which presupposes
an internal frame of reference.
In analyzing the results of numerous studies by American
researchers, and above all the data of the California Longitudinal Study, I. Kon draws an
important methodological conclusion. He notes that a person's life path, an
individual's biography, cannot be reduced to universal laws
of ontogenesis. This path is also shaped by a complex set of socio-historical conditions on which depend the
concrete tasks facing the individual at each given stage of development, and the means
available for solving them.
These same conclusions emerge from research into the processes of
causal attribution, within which fundamental attribution errors were
identified and documented; one of them bears
directly on the problem under discussion. Briefly stated, this error
runs as follows: professional psychologists tend to
overestimate the role of dispositional (personal) factors in the regulation
of behaviour and to underestimate the influence of situational factors.
W. Mischel and his colleagues, in a series of experimental studies,
demonstrated how an "inconspicuous" situational factor levels out
individual differences among subjects. These experiments allowed
the researcher to conclude that trait correlations exist only in
the mind of the observer, and that personality tests have low validity for
predicting an individual's behaviour in different situations.
Contemporary psychology has indeed focused on the
individual's inner world (or on their activity) and shows little interest
in “what happens to a person amid sharp and significant changes in the
spatial, temporal and social circumstances of their life.”
Thus the concept of "life path" is a systematizing
category for understanding and explaining human behaviour in
extreme situations, since through this concept we can grasp
the nature of a person's experiencing of those events that proved
decisive for their biography.
As we have already noted, the principal credit for raising and developing
the problem of the life path belongs, in Russian psychology, to B.G.
Ananyev, N.A. Loginova and S.L. Rubinstein, and in Western psychology to Ch.
Buhler and H. Thomae. In the 1970s, an independent
research field devoted to the study of events emerged abroad, splitting off from the also
fairly new field devoted to the study of psychological
stress — the event-biographical approach. This approach
emphasizes the uniqueness of an individual's life path, as well as
the need to transform the psychology of personality development into a psychology
of the life path, so that the basis of its periodization becomes not sensitive
periods, social transitions and social crises as such, but the
concrete (biographical) events that are experienced by the person
as significant for their development.
The structure and the principal milestones of the life path change from
generation to generation, which entails differences in the psychological
makeup of different generations; that is, the life path depends on the historical
time in which a person lives. In the words of B.G. Ananyev, "history
itself — is the main partner in the drama of a person's life," and social
events become milestones of their biography. However, the extent to which
history is reflected in it differs for different people. In the biographies of contemporaries there is much
in common, but each life is unique. The diversity of biographies
arises from the fact that people living in one and the same macro-environment are
not only members of society but also members of many communities — the micro-environments
of development. Personal development is influenced by the integral way of life within the micro-environment,
which is reflected in people's individual way of life.
An individual's way of life is stable, but in a person's biography there are
turning points — biographical events — that bring about
significant changes in them. Turning points in a person's life
are accompanied by the making of a particular decision, a change in life
values and the meaning of existence, that is, in the person's life path.
S.L. Rubinstein's conception, which regards the person as
the subject of their life, mediating any influences of the external environment, carries
within it the idea of an individually active human being, that is, a person who builds
the conditions of life and their own attitude toward it. From this follows the central
problem of personal life: will the person be able to become the subject of their own
life? Here life is understood as movement upward, toward the human,
the ethical, the social, the psychological.
The aim of crisis psychology is to understand how these crisis events affect the psychological state of people, and to provide support, assistance and coping methods for dealing with them. Crisis events can produce different reactions in different people, and crisis psychology is also concerned with studying individual differences in reactions to crises.
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