Surviving the 2015 Mount Everest disaster: A phenomenological exploration into lived experience and the role of mental toughness

ObjectivesThe 2015 Nepal earthquake and subsequent avalanche at Mount Everest Base Camp is the deadliest mountaineering disaster to date. This study is novel in exploring the lived experiences of survivors and the role of mental toughness in their psychological responses to the disaster.DesignPhenomenological study.MethodTen mountaineers, who were on expeditions during the earthquake, participated in phenomenological interviews. Data were analysed inductively and thematically, while strategies to enhance trustworthiness were also employed.ResultsSeven dimensions emerged from the data, which captured climbers' psychological responses to the disaster, ranging from the moments the earthquake hit to reflections on the disaster after returning home. Contrasting emotional responses were described, and suggested to depend on experience and mental toughness. Negative emotional and behavioural responses were reported in the aftermath. Some climbers reported post-traumatic stress, but also a strong desire to return to Mount Everest and continue mountaineering.ConclusionsThese findings provide detailed insights into the lived experiences of climbers who survived the 2015 Nepal earthquake and Base Camp avalanche. Findings also shed light on the role of mental toughness in coping with and responding to a major natural disaster.     

Who drops-out? Do measures of risk to self and to others predict unplanned endings in primary care counselling?

Aims: Unplanned endings, where clients unilaterally end therapy, are of concern for psychological therapy services generally as they raise questions about the appropriateness of the treatment and it's delivery for some clients. Limited available data indicates that those who drop-out often have more severe symptoms at entry, and have poorer clinical outcomes. This raises further questions about risk to self and others for those clients who leave therapy prematurely and how these clients might be identified and kept engaged. Method: This paper uses a large dataset of CORE data collected routinely in a primary care counselling service between 2000 and 2003. Logistic regression was utilised to consider different measures of risk and other client characteristics recorded at assessment to predict drop-out from the service. Results: These indicate that younger age, greater psychological distress at assessment, an addiction problem and greater risk to others, are associated with an unplanned ending. However, no reliable logistic regression model could be produced. This may be partly due to data quality issues or important characteristics not being available in the data. Implications for practice: The paper concludes that counsellors should actively seek to minimise unplanned endings, as amongst them may be represented the more distressed and risky clients referred to primary care counselling.     

Social influence matters: We follow pandemic guidelines most when our close circle does

Why do we adopt new rules, such as social distancing? Although human sciences research stresses the key role of social influence in behaviour change, most COVID-19 campaigns emphasize the disease’s medical threat. In a global data set (n = 6,675), we investigated how social influences predict people’s adherence to distancing rules during the pandemic. Bayesian regression analyses controlling for stringency of local measures showed that people distanced most when they thought their close social circle did. Such social influence mattered more than people thinking distancing was the right thing to do. People’s adherence also aligned with their fellow citizens, but only if they felt deeply bonded with their country. Self-vulnerability to the disease predicted distancing more for people with larger social circles. Collective efficacy and collectivism also significantly predicted distancing. To achieve behavioural change during crises, policymakers must emphasize shared values and harness the social influence of close friends and family.     

Interactive effects of social network centrality and social identification on stress

The present study aimed to integrate the social identity approach to health and well-being with social network analysis. Previous research on the effects of social network centrality on stress has yielded mixed results. Building on the social identity approach, we argued that these mixed results can be explained, in part, by taking into account the degree to which individuals identify with the social network. We hence hypothesized that the effects of social network centrality on stress are moderated by social identification. Using a full roster method, we assessed the social network of first-year psychology students right after the start of their study programme and three months later. The effects of network centrality (betweenness, closeness, eigenvector centrality) and social identification on stress were examined using structural equation models. As predicted, our results revealed a significant interaction between network centrality and social identification on stress: For weakly or moderately identified students, network centrality was positively related to stress. By contrast, for strongly identified students, network centrality was unrelated to stress. In conclusion, our results point to the perils of being well-connected yet not feeling like one belongs to a group.     

General vs health‐specific consideration of immediate and future consequences to explain eating and exercise behavior in a Norwegian student population: A randomized survey experiment

Over several decades, the consideration of future consequences (CFC) construct has been used to explain and predict health behaviors. However, the reported associations between CFC and health behaviors are relatively weak, leading to the low explanatory power of the models. Recent research suggests that CFC can be a domain‐specific construct. In this study, we explored the psychometric properties of the Norwegian CFC‐general and CFC‐health questionnaires in terms of factor structure and discriminant and convergent validity and tested the association between the general and domain‐specific CFC and exercise and eating behaviors. In a randomized survey experiment, 1,001 university students were assigned to either a CFC‐general or a CFC‐health questionnaire. In the tested models, two dimensions of CFC, consideration of immediate consequences (CFC‐I) and consideration of future consequences (CFC‐F), were independent variables. The exercise and eating behaviors, measured both as self‐evaluated behaviors and self‐reported frequency measures, were dependent variables. The results showed that in both CFC‐general and CFC‐health, CFC‐I and CFC‐F are distinct dimensions that differentially explain variance in health behaviors. A domain‐specific CFC‐health explained a significantly higher amount of variance in self‐reported eating and exercising behaviors than a general CFC. Self‐evaluated health behaviors were better explained by CFC than self‐reported behavioral frequencies. Practical implications of the findings and avenues for future research are discussed.     

What is agentic about the Spatial Agency Bias? How pragmatic relevance contributes to the spatial representations of actions

The mental imagination of (social) actions has been shown to follow a left‐to‐right trajectory, with the thematic agent associated with the left position (Spatial Agency Bias, Suitner & Maass in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 53, 2016, p. 245–301). For example, individuals asked to choose a picture that visualizes the sentence “Tom kicks George” tend to choose an image where the agent, Tom, is positioned on the left‐hand side rather than on the right‐hand side. However, as an alternative to the thematic role of the agent, such findings may reflect a mental representation following pragmatic relevance. Specifically, a pragmatic perspective holds that word order and syntactic functions are strategic devices to communicate that the element is important for the sentence. Thus, positioning in the described picture‐matching task may actually reflect the agent's pragmatic relevance instead of agency per se. As a test, we vary whether sentences are written in the active versus the passive voice. Results from five studies indicate that the passive voice results in the tendency to place the agent on the right‐hand side rather than on the left‐hand side of a picture. Instead, the acted‐upon person is positioned on the left‐hand side of a picture. A sixth experiment reveals that for the passive voice, the agent is still seen as more agentic than the receiver, but is considered less relevant. The findings are congruent with the proposed pragmatic relevance account. Implications for the Spatial Agency Bias as well as for building mental representations in general are discussed.