The war in Ukraine has had impacts around the world. Supply chains have been disrupted, the cost of living has soared and we’ve seen the fastest-growing refugee crisis since World War II. All of these are in addition to the devastating humanitarian and economic impacts within Ukraine.

Our international team was conducting a global study on wellbeing in the lead up to and after the Russian invasion. This provided a unique opportunity to examine the psychological impact of the outbreak of war.

As we explain in a new study published in Nature Communications, we learned the toll on people’s wellbeing was evident across nations, not just in Ukraine. These effects appear to have been temporary – at least for the average person.

But people with certain psychological vulnerabilities struggled to recover from the shock of the war.

Tracking wellbeing during the outbreak of war

People who took part in our study completed a rigorous “experience-sampling” protocol. Specifically, we asked them to report their momentary wellbeing four times per day for a whole month.

Data collection began in October 2021 and continued throughout 2022. So we had been tracking wellbeing around the world during the weeks surrounding the outbreak of war in February 2022.

We also collected measures of personality, along with various sociodemographic variables (including age, gender, political views). This enabled us to assess whether different people responded differently to the crisis. We could also compare these effects across countries.

Our analyses focused primarily on 1,341 participants living in 17 European countries, excluding Ukraine itself (44,894 experience-sampling reports in total). We also expanded these analyses to capture the experiences of 1,735 people living in 43 countries around the world (54,851 experience-sampling reports) – including in Australia.

A global dip in wellbeing

On February 24 2022, the day Russia invaded Ukraine, there was a sharp decline in wellbeing around the world. There was no decline in the month leading up to the outbreak of war, suggesting the change in wellbeing was not already occurring for some other reason.

However, there was a gradual increase in wellbeing during the month after the Russian invasion, suggestive of a “return to baseline” effect. Such effects are commonly reported in psychological research: situations and events that impact our wellbeing often (though not always) do so temporarily.

Unsurprisingly, people in Europe experienced a sharper dip in wellbeing compared to people living elsewhere around the world. Presumably the war was much more salient for those closest to the conflict, compared to those living on an entirely different continent.

Interestingly, day-to-day fluctuations in wellbeing mirrored the salience of the war on social media as events unfolded. Specifically, wellbeing was lower on days when there were more tweets mentioning Ukraine on Twitter/X.

Our results indicate that, on average, it took around two months for people to return to their baseline levels of wellbeing after the invasion.

Different people, different recoveries

There are strong links between our wellbeing and our individual personalities.

However, the dip in wellbeing following the Russian invasion was fairly uniform across individuals. None of the individual factors assessed in our study, including personality and sociodemographic factors, predicted people’s response to the outbreak of war.

On the other hand, personality did play a role in how quickly people recovered. Individual differences in people’s recovery were linked to a personality trait called “stability”. Stability is a broad dimension of personality that combines low neuroticism with high agreeableness and conscientiousness (three traits from the Big Five personality framework).

Stability is so named because it reflects the stability of one’s overall psychological functioning. This can be illustrated by breaking stability down into its three components:

1. low neuroticism describes emotional stability. People low in this trait experience less intense negative emotions such as anxiety, fear or anger, in response to negative events
2. high agreeableness describes social stability. People high in this trait are generally more cooperative, kind, and motivated to maintain social harmony
3. high conscientiousness describes motivational stability. People high in this trait show more effective patterns of goal-directed self-regulation.

So, our data show that people with less stable personalities fared worse in terms of recovering from the impact the war in Ukraine had on wellbeing.

In a supplementary analysis, we found the effect of stability was driven specifically by neuroticism and agreeableness. The fact that people higher in neuroticism recovered more slowly accords with a wealth of research linking this trait with coping difficulties and poor mental health.

These effects of personality on recovery were stronger than those of sociodemographic factors, such as age, gender or political views, which were not statistically significant.

Overall, our findings suggest that people with certain psychological vulnerabilities will often struggle to recover from the shock of global events such as the outbreak of war in Ukraine.

Luke Smillie, Professor in Personality Psychology, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

If you or a loved one have noticed changes in your memory or thinking as you’ve grown older, this could reflect typical changes that occur with ageing. In some cases though, it might suggest something more, such as the onset of dementia.

The best thing to do if you have concerns is to make an appointment with your GP, who will probably run some tests. Assessment is important because if there is something more going on, early diagnosis can enable prompt access to the right interventions, supports and care.

But current methods of dementia screening have limitations, and testing can be daunting for patients.

Our research suggests virtual reality (VR) could be a useful cognitive screening tool, and mitigate some of the challenges associated with current testing methods, opening up the possibility it may one day play a role in dementia diagnosis.

Where current testing is falling short

If someone is worried about their memory and thinking, their GP might ask them to complete a series of quick tasks that check things like the ability to follow simple instructions, basic arithmetic, memory and orientation.

These sorts of screening tools are really good at confirming cognitive problems that may already be very apparent. But commonly used screening tests are not always so good at detecting early and more subtle difficulties with memory and thinking, meaning such changes could be missed until they get worse.

A clinical neuropsychological assessment is better equipped to detect early changes. This involves a comprehensive review of a patient’s personal and medical history, and detailed assessment of cognitive functions, including attention, language, memory, executive functioning, mood factors and more. However, this can be costly and the testing can take several hours.

Testing is also somewhat removed from everyday experience, not directly tapping into activities of daily living.

Enter virtual reality

VR technology uses computer-generated environments to create immersive experiences that feel like real life. While VR is often used for entertainment, it has increasingly found applications in health care, including in rehabilitation and falls prevention.

Using VR for cognitive screening is still a new area. VR-based cognitive tests generally create a scenario such as shopping at a supermarket or driving around a city to ascertain how a person would perform in these situations.

Notably, they engage various senses and cognitive processes such as sight, sound and spatial awareness in immersive ways. All this may reveal subtle impairments which can be missed by standard methods.

VR assessments are also often more engaging and enjoyable, potentially reducing anxiety for those who may feel uneasy in traditional testing environments, and improving compliance compared to standard assessments.

Most studies of VR-based cognitive tests have explored their capacity to pick up impairments in spatial memory (the ability to remember where something is located and how to get there), and the results have been promising.

Given VR’s potential for assisting with diagnosis of cognitive impairment and dementia remains largely untapped, our team developed an online computerised game (referred to as semi-immersive VR) to see how well a person can remember, recall and complete everyday tasks. In our VR game, which lasts about 20 minutes, the user role plays a waiter in a cafe and receives a score on their performance.

To assess its potential, we enlisted more than 140 people to play the game and provide feedback. The results of this research are published across three recent papers.

Testing our VR tool

In our most recently published study, we wanted to verify the accuracy and sensitivity of our VR game to assess cognitive abilities.

We compared our test to an existing screening tool (called the TICS-M) in more than 130 adults. We found our VR task was able to capture meaningful aspects of cognitive function, including recalling food items and spatial memory.

We also found younger adults performed better in the game than older adults, which echoes the pattern commonly seen in regular memory tests.

In a separate study, we followed ten adults aged over 65 while they completed the game, and interviewed them afterwards. We wanted to understand how this group – who the tool would target – perceived the task.

These seniors told us they found the game user-friendly and believed it was a promising tool for screening memory. They described the game as engaging and immersive, expressing enthusiasm to continue playing. They didn’t find the task created anxiety.

For a third study, we spoke to seven health-care professionals about the tool. Overall they gave positive feedback, and noted its dynamic approach to age-old diagnostic challenges.

However, they did flag some concerns and potential barriers to implementing this sort of tool. These included resource constraints in clinical practice (such as time and space to carry out the assessment) and whether it would be accessible for people with limited technological skills. There was also some scepticism about whether the tool would be an accurate method to assist with dementia diagnosis.

While our initial research suggests this tool could be a promising way to assess cognitive performance, this is not the same as diagnosing dementia. To improve the test’s ability to accurately detect those who likely have dementia, we’ll need to make it more specific for that purpose, and carry out further research to validate its effectiveness.

We’ll be conducting more testing of the game soon. Anyone interested in giving it a go to help with our research can register on our team’s website.

Joyce Siette, Research Theme Fellow in Health and Wellbeing, Western Sydney University and Paul Strutt, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Western Sydney University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.