The Psychological Impact of War and Peacekeeping

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Comparing ‘Suspicious Minds at Risk? The Role of Meaning in Processing War, Peacekeeping Experiences’ and ‘Nationalism, Internationalism, and Perceived UN Irrelevance: Mediators of Relationships between Authoritarianism and Support for Military Aggression as Part of the War on Terror’ and How Many Casualties Are Too Many? Proportional Reasoning in the Valuation of Military and Civilian Lives War is one of the unfortunate constants of human history, fought for various reasons. One has to wonder how much human beings can dehumanize the enemy, or their own soldiers with simple propaganda. How much distress and suspicion can lead to soldiers having a hard to readjusting to normal life? How easy it is to see one’s own country as the ultimate moral good, and all means to show it are legitimate, and anyone who speaks out is irrelevant? There are studies over this, but one wonder how well were they done, and how they compare to each other. The journal, ‘Suspicious Minds at Risk? The Role of Meaning in Processing War and Peacekeeping Experiences’, wanted to see correlation of age, meaning as comprehensibility, perceived threat, personal significance, intrusion/avoidance with quality of life.(Shok et al. 2011) They hypothesized that age and perceived threat has a positive correlation with meaning as comprehensibility and meaning as personal significance and that both of these in turn had positive correlation with quality of life and a negative correlation with intrusion/avoidance. Perceived threat was also hypothesized to have a positive correlation with intrusion/avoidance, which had a negative correlation with quality of life. (Shok et al. 2011) It was a cross sectional correlational study, who used Dutch veterans who had been ... ... middle of paper ... ...ers experiencing war and their state mind prior to it. Works Cited Friedrich, J., & Dood, T. L. (2009). How Many Casualties Are Too Many? Proportional Reasoning in the Valuation of Military and Civilian Lives. Journal Of Applied Social Psychology, 39(11), 2541-2569. doi:10.1111/j.1559-1816.2009.00537.x Crowson, H. (2009). Nationalism, Internationalism, and Perceived UN Irrelevanc Mediators of Relationships Between Authoritarianism and Support for Military Aggression as Part of the War on Terror. Journal Of Applied Social Psychology, 39(5), 1137-1162. doi:10.1111/j.1559-1816.2009.00475.x Schok, M. L., Kleber, R. J., Lensvelt-Mulders, G. M., Elands, M., & Weerts, J. (2011). Suspicious Minds at Risk? The Role of Meaning in Processing War and Peacekeeping Experiences. Journal Of Applied Social Psychology, 41(1), 61-81. doi:10.1111/j.1559 1816.2010.00702.x

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