Psychological testing/trait and group dynamics during 110-day in an isolated environment.

Abstract

Studies about the influence and differences of cultural and personal traits will become important for the increasing number of short-duration space flights of international crews supporting the International Space Station (ISS) and for long duration flights of international crews on ISS. The objective of this project was to investigate personal changes during 110-day isolation in the Russian Experiment Module. The Giessen Test (GT) was used to determine if personal traits of the subjects change during isolation. The GT was chosen as an individual diagnostic instrument because it includes an important range of social views and reactions. The GT reveals which characteristics a person, in this case a crew member, ascribes about him/herself (personal-picture). Questions about personal qualities were asked indirectly to better reveal psychosocial tendencies and defense mechanisms. Many personality tests focus on deriving information about how the subject "really" is. However, the GT deviates from this pure individual psychological ideal test construction and focuses on how the subject represents him/herself in psychoanalytically relevant categories in group relationships. We hypothesized that personal traits become more explicit and accentuated during prolonged confinement. Accentuations of personal traits were predicted due to the experience on MIR station where the American astronauts realized how different their Russian colleagues become compared to their common training time on the ground. The formation of subgroups was predicted, as it is often observed within different types of groups in Japanese, Russian isolation studies and at the Japanese Antarctic research station, Syowa.