THE POTENTIAL OF SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE TO EXPLAIN POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

Abstract

The problem of stress is extremely attractive for researchers, the interest in its analysis is hardly exhausted. Until now, in the focus of attention of scientists, the causes and manifestations of stress are revealed at all levels of analysis, starting from the micro-level, be it the genome or cells, to the macro-level, be it culture and society. Various models (biomedical, dispositional, situational, transactional, etc.) explaining stress have been developed and received numerous empirical tests; instruments for measuring states associated with stress were constructed, strategies for coping with stress and other numerous issues were studied. The author's goal is to demonstrate the potential of social-psychological knowledge to explain stress and the potential of coping with it on the basis of the social identity approach.

The presented analysis of the potential of socio-psychological knowledge for the study of stress problems and its overcoming allows us to determine a number of prospects for further actions. First, a comparative analysis of the presented socio-psychological perspective of studying stress, ideas, models and concepts of Ukrainian authors regarding its overcoming is promising. Secondly, the theory of social representations is a sufficiently productive framework that would allow analyzing how naive explanations of stress are generated in numerous communications, how they are used to overcome it. Thirdly, in the logic of one of the hypotheses of the new health psychology, according to which multiple social identities (social identities are positive, meaningful and compatible with each other) allow a person to have a kind of psychological resources that positively affect his health and well-being, it can be considered that a person has more resources to cope with stress.