Dai micro-stressor allo stress traumatico: effetti sulla salute mentale e il comportamento

Previous research addressed how stress can influence mental health and behavior with a little focus on specific aspects of stress exposure, thus, this work aimed to provide integrative evidence on how different facets of stress exposure may affect mental health and both positive and negative behaviors by also shedding light on the role of potential specific individual and environmental moderators. In doing so, we conducted several studies exploring the effect of different sources of stress, in terms of type, degree, nature of event (from micro to traumatic) and duration on mental health and behavior considering the moderating role of individual (i.e., emotional intelligence and self-compassion) and environmental factors (i.e., culture, social support). The first set of studies focused on a severe source of traumatic stress that is the recent war in Armenia. Specifically, we investigated the short (immediate) and long-term impact of war on mental health while considering whether and how individual characteristics, like self-compassion and emotional intelligence can work as protective factors at two different phases of post-war adaptation (Study 1). We conducted Study 2 within the same population and aimed to explore the psychological impact of war on civilians by examining the direct and interactive effect of environmental factors like perceived social support and ethnic identity on post-traumatic symptomatology after the war. As a second step we examined the link between different sources of stressful and traumatic life events and their potential effect on behavior. Namely, in Study 3 we examined the relationship between stressful and traumatic events having different durations and maladaptive behaviors, such as alcohol use by considering the potential moderating role of environmental factors like social support. Last, we also investigated (Study 4) the effect of different types of acute laboratory micro stressors. 2 More precisely, we assessed if different types of acute micro sources of stress could impact adaptive behaviors (prosocial behaviors such as donations) once again considering the possible moderating role of specific individual characteristics (i.e., emotional intelligence). These studies allowed us to better understand the war-stress effect on mental health and ethno-cultural aspects (Study 1 and 2), stress-related maladaptive behavior (Study 3) as well as stress-related adaptive behavior (Study 4). In Study 1, we explored the impact of war-related stress on civilians. In particular, we aimed to investigate how the exposure to the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war influenced post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) of Armenian civilians shortly after the event and after six months as the population adjusted to the after-war phase. We further aimed to test whether and how individual characteristics (i.e., emotional intelligence and self-compassion) moderated the war-PTSS link at the two different post-war phases. The results revealed that participants reported significantly greater PTSS shortly after the war as compared to 6 months after the war ended. It was also found that while lower self-compassion was related to more PTSS at the beginning (shortly after the war), lower emotional intelligence was associated with more symptoms 6 months later. In Study 2, we studied the psychological impact of the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war on Armenian civilians’ mental health focusing on cultural aspects. In particular, the main goal of this study was to explore the effect of war on civilians by examining the direct and interactive effect of cultural and environmental characteristics such as ethnic identity and perceived social support on post-traumatic stress symptoms following the exposure to war. The results showed that higher social support was directly related to fewer post-traumatic stress symptoms.