Factors of Stress Resistance in Extreme Situations

Psychology has accumulated sufficient experience to ensure the stress resistance of human behavior in extreme situations associated with professional risk.

First, a specialist must possess stably formed professional knowledge, skills, and abilities. As academician P. V. Simonov notes, a high level of command of knowledge, skills, and abilities, whether consciously recognized or unconsciously felt by the subject, makes him calm, confident, independent, and able to retain self-control in a complex and rapidly changing environment. Whereas, due to insufficient professional training combined with the dominance of certain primary needs, a person becomes anxious, preoccupied with his standing among others, jealous of others' successes, and dependent on patronage and support. Insufficient training not only diminishes the social value of the personality but also harms the person, creating in him a sense of his own inferiority.

Second, a sufficient degree of formation of the specialist's abilities to carry out professional activity is required. The ability to carry out an activity is determined above all by a high level of development of personal qualities:

• • social, moral, and intellectual maturity of the personality (a high level of moral and legal consciousness, social responsibility, honesty, integrity, conscientiousness, discipline);
• • psychological and emotional-volitional stability of the personality (a strong type of nervous system, neuropsychological resistance to prolonged psychophysical overload, a high level of self-control and composure in critical situations, determination, courage).

Third, the specialist's immediate psychological readiness for action in various extreme situations is necessary, as well as a formed personal attitude toward survival should such a situation arise. These elements of psychological preparation for action are given great importance in professions associated with extreme conditions, such as test pilot, rescuer, and so on. To enhance stress-resistant behavior in various extreme situations, it is especially important to form in the specialist a personal attitude toward survival. For this purpose, it is recommended to use two techniques: filling out a "Survival Commitment" and conducting re-creative visualization. The "Survival Commitment" has its own specifics depending on the professional activity. Re-creative visualization consists of creating a mental image of a successful resolution of the situation.

For example, could a female glider pilot survive falling from a great height in a disintegrating glider, still strapped to the wreckage of her seat? It might seem the situation was hopeless, with no chance of success or even luck. Yet the glider pilot Larisa Savitskaya did not give up, did not resign herself to the thought of death, and managed to concentrate her will, fighting for her life throughout every minute of the fall. First she managed to stop the seat's chaotic tumbling and regain her orientation. Then she curled into a tuck, tensing and bracing every muscle for the impact of the onrushing ground. The second round of the struggle began on the ground, when, having sustained severe injuries, she regained consciousness five hours later. First she found the strength to build a kind of shelter from the glider's wreckage and took refuge in it from the rain. When the sun came out, she found her wet matches, spread them out to dry, and then lit a fire. In this way she survived in the taiga for three days until rescuers found her .

Thus, a person's survival in an extreme life situation depends not only on the specifics of the situation itself but also on the person's attitude toward it. One person perishes because he assesses the situation as hopeless and takes no active steps to change it, while another seeks a way out, striving through active, initiative-driven action to influence the situation, bring about favorable changes in it, and wins the struggle for life.

Search activity enhances a person's stress resistance, exerts a stimulating effect on the body and psyche, effectively mobilizes all the resources of the body and psyche, and prevents their rapid depletion. Conversely, a passive-defensive reaction to various stressors leads to the rapid depletion of the resources of the body and psyche, and consequently to a weakening of a person's stress resistance.

A paradoxical fact is known: during wars and other extreme situations, when prolonged emotional strain is required and the number of negative emotions rises sharply, psychosomatic and even ordinary colds become significantly less frequent. It would seem that everything should be the opposite — after all, people's strength is stretched to the limit, nutrition and living conditions deteriorate sharply, and stress-inducing factors grow like a snowball, yet ordinary illnesses retreat thanks to people's search activity. In the postwar period, however, when people return to a normal life that no longer demands excessive emotional strain, these illnesses reassert themselves under the influence of post-traumatic stress. A person's ability, in extreme situations, to display search activity and to withstand, with dignity and minimal losses, various dangers in the form of physiological or psychological stressors depends on his ability to control his emotions of fear in moments of danger, which is yet another essential factor in human survival.

Emotions of fear in moments of danger help a person quickly orient himself in the surrounding reality and respond adequately to danger, but only until they escalate into an affect of fear, the extreme degree of which is emotional shock, occurring in either an active or a passive form. In the active form of emotional shock, a person experiences panic fear and performs fussy, impulsive movements that poorly obey the will, which deprives him of the ability to control the situation. In the passive form of emotional shock, the personality completely loses the capacity for any activity whatsoever and turns into a "sack of muscles and bones." Both the active and passive forms of the affect of fear deprive a person of the ability to fight in a dangerous situation, disrupt perception, thinking, memory, and other mental processes, and make him indecisive, passive, highly prone to victimization, and predisposed to becoming a victim of disasters and other stress-inducing situations. This was expressed very precisely and vividly by the intrepid traveler A. Bombard:

"When a ship sinks, it seems to a man that the whole world is going down with his ship; when the two planks of the deck slip out from under him, his courage and his reason vanish along with them. And even if he finds a lifeboat at that moment, he is not yet saved. Because he freezes in it without moving, struck down by the disaster that has befallen him. Because he is no longer alive. Enveloped in the darkness of night, carried along by the current and the wind, trembling before the abyss, afraid of both noise and silence, within a mere three days he is completely transformed into a dead man.

Victims of legendary shipwrecks, who perished before your time, I know: it was not the sea that killed you, it was not hunger that killed you, it was not thirst that killed you! Rocking on the waves beneath the plaintive cries of gulls, you died of fear."

It should be kept in mind that at the moment of onset and during the first stage of the affect — the accumulation of emotional tension — emotions of fear are still quite subject to volitional control, and every mentally healthy person is capable of suppressing them by using special techniques of mental self-regulation:

• • activating the sense of one's own dignity, pride, responsibility for the task at hand, a sense of shame, and other moral feelings that help a person control his emotions and keep the emotions of fear "in check";
• • targeted actions that reduce emotional tension in a dangerous situation: voluntary regulation of breathing depth (slow, deep breathing); muscle relaxation (voluntary relaxation of the muscles of the limbs and the entire body); briefly fixing one's gaze on neutral objects that do not provoke emotional tension;
• • the voluntary suppression of the impulsive motor reactions characteristic of the affect of fear.

The next psychological factor determining a professional's stress resistance is the stability of everyday personal life. It has been established that the more changes occur in a person's life, the more anxious he becomes, and the higher the likelihood of developing a mental or somatic illness.

The Social Readjustment Rating Scale (Table 9) was developed by the American scientists T. Holmes and R. Rahe. On this scale, various life events, depending on the degree of pressure they exert on a person's psyche, are rated with a certain number of points (from 0 to 100).

Table 9. Holmes and Rahe Social Readjustment Rating Scale

End of Table 9

If you wish to use this scale, mark all the events that have happened to you over the past year, and then add up the total number of "change points." According to Holmes and Rahe, the greater the number of "change points" accumulated at present, the greater the likelihood that the person will become ill. Accumulating more than 300 points within a single year places a person at risk of a fairly serious reaction, that is, depression or psychosomatic illness (heart attack, asthma, allergies, and so on).

Another psychological factor determining the stress resistance of a specialist's behavior is the correspondence between a professional's level of aspiration for a given position and his actual abilities. Two extremes should be avoided: excessively overestimating and excessively underestimating one's own abilities and capabilities. One should not take great figures as a model. It is better to realistically assess one's abilities and form a corresponding level of aspiration. It is quite acceptable for it to be a little higher than what can be achieved for certain. Just as in building muscle it is the final effort, made through "I can't," that adds strength to the muscles, so too in life strategy — the goals one sets should be a little higher than one's present capabilities, so that there is an incentive for development. But they should not be unattainable. Concern for raising one's self-esteem is among the means of stress prevention and of increasing a person's stress resistance.

The most important psychological factors determining the stress resistance of human behavior in extreme situations associated with professional risk are the presence of: stably formed professional knowledge, skills, and abilities; abilities to perform professional activity; a specialist's psychological readiness for action in various extreme situations; stability of everyday personal life; and others.

Conclusions

• • Extreme situations are those that confront a person with excessive difficulties, requiring the utmost strain of his capabilities.
• • Extreme situations are characterized by a number of significant psychogenic signs that have a destructive, damaging effect on a person's body and psyche. These include: panic, altered afferentation, affectation, monotony, desynchronosis, altered perception of spatial structure, and social isolation.
• • In the dynamics of the development of an extreme situation, and consequently of post-traumatic mental disorders, three periods are observed that are closely linked to the organization of rescue operations and the provision of material, medical, and psychological assistance to victims: the first — from the onset of the situation's impact until rescue operations are organized; the second — the organization of rescue operations; and the third — the evacuation of victims to safe areas.
• • The most important psychological factors determining the stress resistance of human behavior in extreme situations associated with professional risk are the presence of: stably formed professional knowledge, skills, and abilities; abilities to perform professional activity; a specialist's psychological readiness for action in various extreme situations; stability of everyday personal life; and others.

Discussion Questions

• 1. Characterize the concept of "extreme situation."
• 2. Name the types of extreme situations.
• 3. Name the psychosomatic manifestations resulting from exposure to an extreme situation.
• 4. What psychogenic signs have a destructive effect on the human psyche?
• 5. What behavioral models are possible for a subject under conditions of social tension?
• 6. What psychopathological changes are observed in a person after trauma?
• 7. Characterize the dynamics of the development of an extreme situation.
• 8. What are the signs of stress and the situations that cause it?
• 9. Name the factors of stress resistance.
• 10. Name the methods of adaptation after an extreme situation.