1. Fluctuations in Anger, Stress and Curiosity scores during the years of the Greek Debt Crisis
M. Callifronas MD, L. Kontou PgD
Hellenic Institute for Psychotherapy (NPO)
INTRODUCTION
According to the Kübler-Ross model, anger is the second psychological response of grief after the appearance of denial . Anger is a natural response to loss and can be a difficult emotion to cope with since many of us will suppress the anger, keeping it bottled up or even turning it inward, toward ourselves. Anger turned inward is guilt as to whether “we should have done something”, and this leads, through the feelings of helplessness, to depression. The passage of new austerity measures in Greece which started in Spring 2011, was followed by numerous economic inconsistencies and had a strong public reaction. The crisis brings anxiety and anger. As the crisis grows, the more stress and anger outbursts, which sometimes is violent . Therefore , events were hypothesised as potentially having had an impact on the mental health and well-being of individual Greeks, thereby leading to an increase of 35% in suicides (Branas et al.., 2015) 1
AIM
RESULTS
In this paper we present the results of anger, stress and curiosity scores in three groups distributed over the first three years (2011, 2012 and 2013), of the greek financial crisis
Traits/
Years/
Anxiety
(m+sd)
Anger
Curiosity
2011
2,33
± 0,34
2,41
± 0,56
2,94
± 031
2012
2,35
± 0,26
2.66
± 0,55
2.82
± 0.35
2013
2,44
2,70
± 0,57
2,79
± 0,40
PARTICIPANTS
Participants (Σn=30) are coming from the northern suburbs of Athens, they usually have higher or middle education and belong to middle social class. They have registered to follow an anger management programme (Callifronas and Kontou, 2015) . Participants' age ranges from 36 to 55 years old and in their wide majority (87%) are female. The number of participants for the years 2011, 2012 and was respectively n1=29, n2=23, n3=31 . Total N=83.
METHODS
The measurement took place in the beginning of their participation in an anger manage ment group during the month of June in 2011, 2012 and 2013 respectively. As a measurement tool we used the self administered STPI (State-Trait Personality Inventory , Spielberger & Reheiser, 2009) , which includes eighty questions designed to measure transitory and dispositional anger, anxiety, curiosity and depression in a four-level Likert scale.
Table 1
DIAGRAMS
CONCLUSIONS
Our results (Table 1) showed a scalar increase of the anger and stress scores while observing a respective scalar decrease of the curiosity score. These results are congruent to our hypothesis that financial crisis can have an important psychological impact. Moreover the inverse ratio between the two patterns of stress and anger, and the pattern of curiosity might probably show the reduction of creativity and resilience in periods of psychological distress, but more data are needed to prove such a hypothesis. However a larger number of participants ie. ≥ 77 persons per group (Schwartz, Flamant and Lelouch, 1981, p.280), is needed in order to show a significance between them, since the differences in the present sample are non statistically significant (one way ANOVA F=2,41>0.05, N.S.). This is a preliminary report.