British ]ournu/ of Pychology (1992), 83, 337-341 0 1992 The British Psychological Society
337
Printed in Great Britain
Expedition stress and personality change Fraser N. Watts* and Shernaaz M. Webster Medical Research Council Applied PgcholoD Unit, I5 Chaucer Road, Cambridge CB2 2EF, UK
Colin J. Morley Department of Paediatrics, University of Cambridge
John Cohen Department of Primav Health Care, University College and Middlsex School of Medicine, University of London
There have been few attempts to investigate the widespread assumption that shortterm challenges can have beneficial effects on personality. An expedition to India organized by the British Schools Exploring Society provided such an opportunity. The Gordon Personal Profile Inventory showed that the expedition was associated with increased ascendancy, emotional stability, sociability and responsibility, and decreased cautiousness. Women tended to benefit more than men. The results suggest that the expedition was associated with positive personality changes, though other explanations of the findings cannot be ruled out.
Though relatively under-researched, there is a widespread cultural assumption that exposing people to short-term challenging or stressful situations can be potentially beneficial. For example, many youth education and management training events are organized on this assumption. The study to be reported here is an investigation of one such event, a deliberately demanding six-week expedition to India by a group of British adolescents, organized by the British Schools Exploring Society. The purpose of the present study was therefore to assess whether there were in fact measurable differences in personality between the beginning and end of the expedition, and to examine which personal characteristics were associated with such change. The participants in the present study included both males and females, allowing us also to examine possible sex differences in personality change. There have been few previous studies of expedition stress, and these have usually involved extreme environmental conditions (for example, the International Biomedical Expedition to the Antarctic : McCormick, Taylor, Rivolier & Cazes, 1985). However, expeditions would seem to provide a valuable context for studying individual differences in stress research, because they provide a good opportunity for studying stress in the context of demands that are not only naturalistic, but that are
*
Requests for reprints. 14
P S Y 83
338
Fraser
N.Watts e t al.
also of predictable duration and that include situational characteristics which are more or less uniform for all participants. In the present expedition the situational demands included both the potential for physical stresses associated with the strenuous programme of trekking in a novel environment, and also the sociallinterpersonal stresses which may have resulted from having to live for prolonged periods in very close quarters with other participants (who were unknown to each other prior to the expedition). Current theoretical conceptions of stress emphasize the importance of coping processes (Antonovsky, 1979; Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), and there is growing evidence for the relevance of coping as a mediator of the potentially harmful effects of stress (e.g. Folkman, Lazarus, DunkelSchetter, DeLongis & Gruen, 1986). However, on theoretical grounds it should also be expected that where people cope successfully with potential stresses their personality functioning may be enhanced as a consequence.
Method Strbjects The expedition consisted of 35 leaders and 97 school-age participants (aged from 17 to 20). All the members of the expedition had volunteered and then been selected by stringent interview. They all had previous experience of outdoor activities. Twenty-one of the expeditionaries were Indian, but it was considered that they were insufficient in number to examine whether they showed differences from the main group so they were not studied. Data were collected from the remaining 76 expeditionaries who were British; 49 were male and 27 were female. The leaders were not investigated.
Expedition The British Schools Exploring Society expedition, which lasted six weeks in the summer of 1988, started in Delhi and travelled for two continuous days by coach to Srinagar in Kashmir where many of the expedition members were afflicted by dysentery. After a day’s rest they travelled on up into the Thajiwas Valley and, after appropriate acclimatization, proceeded on foot to the Gadsar Valley at 14000 feet where two and a half weeks were spent in scientific work and trekking. The expedition then decamped with a further two days’ arduous coach journey to Ladakh. Two weeks were then spent in high altitude climbing and trekking between 15000 and 12000 feet. The final week of the expedition involved travelling back from Leh, the capital of Ladakh, through Srinagar to Delhi. An account of the expedition has been published by Percy (1989).
Measures As a measure of aspects of personality dimensions relevant to the expedition, subjects completed the Gordon Personal Profile Inventory (GPP-I) (Gordon, 1978) at the start and end of the expedition. The GPP-I is a self-report personality inventory employing a forced-choice technique and was developed using a factor analytic technique. It provides measures of arcendmy (i.e. leadership items such as being active and self-assured in groups, taking independent decisions etc.), responsibilig (i.e. being persevering, reliable etc.), emotionuGstubility (i.e. being relatively free from worries and anxiety), sociubitig (i.e. enjoying being with others, being gregarious and sociable), cautiowwss (i.e. being careful about decisions, avoiding risks etc.), original thinking (intellectual curiosity etc.), personuf relations (being tolerant and trusting with others), and vigour (being energetic and vigorous). The GPP-I was selected because of its careful psychometric construction and its focus on dimensions of personality often supposed to be affected by outdoor expeditions such as the one studied here. All 76 subjects completed the initial GPP-I but only 65 (86 per cent) completed the final GPP-I. Completion of the GPP-I was presented as
339
Expedition stress
an expedition requirement. No specific hypotheses or rationale were presented to subjects, though they may of course have made their own assumptions.
Results T o examine change in personality scores over the expedition, each of the eight GPP-I scales was subjected to a separate two-way analysis of variance (sex x time) ; and the cell means and F values are given in Table 1. There were 65 subjects (40 males; 25 females) in each analysis.
Table 1. Means and F values of personality scales Males Scale Ascendancy Responsibility Emotional stability Sociability Cautiousness Original thinking Personal relations Vigour
F values
Females
Before
After
Before
After
Sex
Change
Interaction
23.7 24.3 26.4
24.9 24.9 27.3
20.9 24.7 20.8
23.4 26.1 22.6
3.6* 0.6 25.1**
16.7** 5.3* 11.4**
2.2 0.6 1.4
21.9 22.2 26.9
22.3 20.9 26.1
24.4 22.4 26.2
26.6 21.6 26.7
6.5* 0.1 0.0
8.1** 4.0* 0.1
3.8 0.4 1.4
23.3
22.8
21.3
22.8
0.4
0.8
3.6
26.1
25.6
25.7
27.7
0.8
2.4
7.3**
* p < .05;**p < .01.
Five scales showed a significant main effect of time. These were, in order of decreasing magnitude of the effect, ascendancy, emotional stability, sociability, responsibility (all of which increased) and cautiousness (which decreased). The trend was for females to change more than males on ascendancy, emotional stability, sociability and responsibility, though only on sociability did the interaction between time and sex approach significance. For the personal relations and vigour scales there was no significant main effect of time. The trend was for females to improve but for males to deteriorate. On vigour, the sex by time interaction was highly significant, whereas for personal relations it only approached significance. On both of these scales, when females were analysed separately, they showed a significant improvement over time (personal relations, t = 2.38 (p < .05); vigour, t = 2.56 (p < .05)). For original thinking, no terms in the analysis of variance approached significance. These analyses of personality change could only be carried out on subjects who completed the GPP-I at the start and end of the expedition. It was possible to obtain a 100 per cent response rate before the expedition, but 11 (nine males, two females) of the 76 subjects failed to complete it afterwards. Because of this an analysis was 14-2
340
Fraser
N.Watts et ai.
carried out to check whether there were differences between these non-completers and other subjects at the start of the expedition. Non-completers were found on t tests to be less responsible (t(69) = 2.24, p < .05); and they tended to have lower vigour scores (t(69) = 1.94,p < .06). Clearly, it cannot be assumed that they would necessarily have benefited from the expedition as much as the other subjects. Improvement on the personality measures was highly correlated with personality levels at the start of the expedition. For example, taking the sum of ascendancy, responsibility, emotional stability and sociability, the four scales which showed most change and which together constitute the Gordon Personality Projile, there was a strong correlation between pre-expedition scores and change scores (r(63) = .76, p < .OOl). There were similar correlations, albeit not quite so high, for each individual scale.
Discussion The study provides evidence consistent with the proposition that short-term challenges such as those studied here may be capable of producing the kind of personality changes often claimed for them. These changes in personality were based on self-report measures. Though there is reasonable evidence for their validity (Gordon, 1978), there can be no guarantee that changes in self-report measures would be paralleled by observable changes in personality functioning. Incidentally, some validity of the self-report measure is indicated by the fact that the 14 per cent who did not complete the questionnaire on the second occasion had significantly lower responsibility scores on the first occasion. The fact that assessment of change could only be carried out on the 86 per cent of subjects who completed the questionnaire on both occasions may have produced a somewhat inflated estimate of the personality change that occurred in the total group (i.e. those who failed to complete the questionnaire on the second occasion may have changed less than the average of the group). However, given the magnitude of the changes, it is reasonable to assume that they would still have been significant had complete data been obtained. It should also be noted that the post-expedition questionnaire was completed immediately after the expedition, hence no information is available about how stable the measured changes were over time. It is also possible that the observed changes reflect a temporary change in mood state rather than an enduring personality change. However, it is doubtful whether the particular pattern of changes observed is what would be expected from mood change. For example, mood enhancement would not be expected to improve responsibility and cautiousness, but leave vigour and personal relations unchanged. Nevertheless, the contribution of mood changes to the observed pattern of questionnaire responses cannot be discounted. Changes in ascendancy (i.e. leadership) and responsibility are perhaps those that would be most expected by expedition organizers. The fact that some scales (for example, original thinking and personal relations) did not change argues against the possibility that the observed changes reflect only a general response set to report change by the end of the expedition. There was a consistent trend for females to show more positive personality change than males. This cannot be adequately explained in terms of lower baseline scores for females ; for example, females improved more on sociability despite having higher scores at the start of the expedition. Differences in baseline levels also cannot explain
Expedition stress
341
why only females tended to improve in vigour and personal relations, whereas males tended to deteriorate. It is possible that the kinds of demands made by the expedition were less familiar to females than to males, and this may have resulted in their having more impact on females. A number of previous studies have found women to be more susceptible to the negative effects of stress compared to men (e.g. Pearlin & Schooler, 1978). However, as noted by Cronkite & Moos (1984), studies of sex differences in response to positive influences are rare. It is thus noteworthy that women benefited more than men from the experience of the present expedition, suggesting that such differential positive effects should be examined in other contexts. The degree of personality change was strongly related to initial scores on personality measures. That is, it was those with the strongest qualities of ascendancy, emotional stability, sociability and responsibility who showed the most benefit in these areas. Such results might have implications for selection criteria for such organized expeditions (as might the finding that the use of avoidance strategies was significantly related to the degree of personality change). However, in this regard our results are limited by the considerations that (a) we examined changes on only a small number of personality measures, and thus have no information on what other possible positive changes may have resulted from the expedition, and (b) it is possible that other variables that we did not include may have been better predictors of change. Finally, since the present sample was already highly selected, it should not necessarily be expected that if such expeditions were made available to a broader cross-section of the population comparable benefits to those indicated here would be obtained. References Antonovsky, A. (1979). Health, Stress and Coping. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Cronkite, R. C. & Moos, R. H. (1984). The role of predisposing and moderating factors in the stress-illness relationship. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 25, 372-393. Folkman, S., Lazarus, R. S., Dunkel-Schetter, C., DeLongis, A. & Gruen, R. (1986). The dynamics of a stressful encounter : Cognitive appraisal, coping, and encounter outcomes. Journal of Personality and Social Pychology, 50, 992-1003. Gordon, L. V. (1978). Gordon Personal Projle Inventory. New York: Psychological Corporation. Lazarus, R. S. & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, Appraisal and Coping. New York: Springer. McCormick, I. A., Taylor, A. J., Rivolier, J. & Cazes, G. (1985). A psychometric study of stress and coping during the International Biomedical Expedition to the Antarctic (IBEA). Journal of Human Stress, 11, 150-156. Pearlin, L. I. & Schooler, C. (1978). The structure of coping. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 19, 2-21. Percy, M. (1989). Journey without an end. Geographical Magazine, 61, (4), 40-44. Received 14 December 1990; revised version received I5 August 1991
337
Printed in Great Britain
Expedition stress and personality change Fraser N. Watts* and Shernaaz M. Webster Medical Research Council Applied PgcholoD Unit, I5 Chaucer Road, Cambridge CB2 2EF, UK
Colin J. Morley Department of Paediatrics, University of Cambridge
John Cohen Department of Primav Health Care, University College and Middlsex School of Medicine, University of London
There have been few attempts to investigate the widespread assumption that shortterm challenges can have beneficial effects on personality. An expedition to India organized by the British Schools Exploring Society provided such an opportunity. The Gordon Personal Profile Inventory showed that the expedition was associated with increased ascendancy, emotional stability, sociability and responsibility, and decreased cautiousness. Women tended to benefit more than men. The results suggest that the expedition was associated with positive personality changes, though other explanations of the findings cannot be ruled out.
Though relatively under-researched, there is a widespread cultural assumption that exposing people to short-term challenging or stressful situations can be potentially beneficial. For example, many youth education and management training events are organized on this assumption. The study to be reported here is an investigation of one such event, a deliberately demanding six-week expedition to India by a group of British adolescents, organized by the British Schools Exploring Society. The purpose of the present study was therefore to assess whether there were in fact measurable differences in personality between the beginning and end of the expedition, and to examine which personal characteristics were associated with such change. The participants in the present study included both males and females, allowing us also to examine possible sex differences in personality change. There have been few previous studies of expedition stress, and these have usually involved extreme environmental conditions (for example, the International Biomedical Expedition to the Antarctic : McCormick, Taylor, Rivolier & Cazes, 1985). However, expeditions would seem to provide a valuable context for studying individual differences in stress research, because they provide a good opportunity for studying stress in the context of demands that are not only naturalistic, but that are
*
Requests for reprints. 14
P S Y 83
338
Fraser
N.Watts e t al.
also of predictable duration and that include situational characteristics which are more or less uniform for all participants. In the present expedition the situational demands included both the potential for physical stresses associated with the strenuous programme of trekking in a novel environment, and also the sociallinterpersonal stresses which may have resulted from having to live for prolonged periods in very close quarters with other participants (who were unknown to each other prior to the expedition). Current theoretical conceptions of stress emphasize the importance of coping processes (Antonovsky, 1979; Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), and there is growing evidence for the relevance of coping as a mediator of the potentially harmful effects of stress (e.g. Folkman, Lazarus, DunkelSchetter, DeLongis & Gruen, 1986). However, on theoretical grounds it should also be expected that where people cope successfully with potential stresses their personality functioning may be enhanced as a consequence.
Method Strbjects The expedition consisted of 35 leaders and 97 school-age participants (aged from 17 to 20). All the members of the expedition had volunteered and then been selected by stringent interview. They all had previous experience of outdoor activities. Twenty-one of the expeditionaries were Indian, but it was considered that they were insufficient in number to examine whether they showed differences from the main group so they were not studied. Data were collected from the remaining 76 expeditionaries who were British; 49 were male and 27 were female. The leaders were not investigated.
Expedition The British Schools Exploring Society expedition, which lasted six weeks in the summer of 1988, started in Delhi and travelled for two continuous days by coach to Srinagar in Kashmir where many of the expedition members were afflicted by dysentery. After a day’s rest they travelled on up into the Thajiwas Valley and, after appropriate acclimatization, proceeded on foot to the Gadsar Valley at 14000 feet where two and a half weeks were spent in scientific work and trekking. The expedition then decamped with a further two days’ arduous coach journey to Ladakh. Two weeks were then spent in high altitude climbing and trekking between 15000 and 12000 feet. The final week of the expedition involved travelling back from Leh, the capital of Ladakh, through Srinagar to Delhi. An account of the expedition has been published by Percy (1989).
Measures As a measure of aspects of personality dimensions relevant to the expedition, subjects completed the Gordon Personal Profile Inventory (GPP-I) (Gordon, 1978) at the start and end of the expedition. The GPP-I is a self-report personality inventory employing a forced-choice technique and was developed using a factor analytic technique. It provides measures of arcendmy (i.e. leadership items such as being active and self-assured in groups, taking independent decisions etc.), responsibilig (i.e. being persevering, reliable etc.), emotionuGstubility (i.e. being relatively free from worries and anxiety), sociubitig (i.e. enjoying being with others, being gregarious and sociable), cautiowwss (i.e. being careful about decisions, avoiding risks etc.), original thinking (intellectual curiosity etc.), personuf relations (being tolerant and trusting with others), and vigour (being energetic and vigorous). The GPP-I was selected because of its careful psychometric construction and its focus on dimensions of personality often supposed to be affected by outdoor expeditions such as the one studied here. All 76 subjects completed the initial GPP-I but only 65 (86 per cent) completed the final GPP-I. Completion of the GPP-I was presented as
339
Expedition stress
an expedition requirement. No specific hypotheses or rationale were presented to subjects, though they may of course have made their own assumptions.
Results T o examine change in personality scores over the expedition, each of the eight GPP-I scales was subjected to a separate two-way analysis of variance (sex x time) ; and the cell means and F values are given in Table 1. There were 65 subjects (40 males; 25 females) in each analysis.
Table 1. Means and F values of personality scales Males Scale Ascendancy Responsibility Emotional stability Sociability Cautiousness Original thinking Personal relations Vigour
F values
Females
Before
After
Before
After
Sex
Change
Interaction
23.7 24.3 26.4
24.9 24.9 27.3
20.9 24.7 20.8
23.4 26.1 22.6
3.6* 0.6 25.1**
16.7** 5.3* 11.4**
2.2 0.6 1.4
21.9 22.2 26.9
22.3 20.9 26.1
24.4 22.4 26.2
26.6 21.6 26.7
6.5* 0.1 0.0
8.1** 4.0* 0.1
3.8 0.4 1.4
23.3
22.8
21.3
22.8
0.4
0.8
3.6
26.1
25.6
25.7
27.7
0.8
2.4
7.3**
* p < .05;**p < .01.
Five scales showed a significant main effect of time. These were, in order of decreasing magnitude of the effect, ascendancy, emotional stability, sociability, responsibility (all of which increased) and cautiousness (which decreased). The trend was for females to change more than males on ascendancy, emotional stability, sociability and responsibility, though only on sociability did the interaction between time and sex approach significance. For the personal relations and vigour scales there was no significant main effect of time. The trend was for females to improve but for males to deteriorate. On vigour, the sex by time interaction was highly significant, whereas for personal relations it only approached significance. On both of these scales, when females were analysed separately, they showed a significant improvement over time (personal relations, t = 2.38 (p < .05); vigour, t = 2.56 (p < .05)). For original thinking, no terms in the analysis of variance approached significance. These analyses of personality change could only be carried out on subjects who completed the GPP-I at the start and end of the expedition. It was possible to obtain a 100 per cent response rate before the expedition, but 11 (nine males, two females) of the 76 subjects failed to complete it afterwards. Because of this an analysis was 14-2
340
Fraser
N.Watts et ai.
carried out to check whether there were differences between these non-completers and other subjects at the start of the expedition. Non-completers were found on t tests to be less responsible (t(69) = 2.24, p < .05); and they tended to have lower vigour scores (t(69) = 1.94,p < .06). Clearly, it cannot be assumed that they would necessarily have benefited from the expedition as much as the other subjects. Improvement on the personality measures was highly correlated with personality levels at the start of the expedition. For example, taking the sum of ascendancy, responsibility, emotional stability and sociability, the four scales which showed most change and which together constitute the Gordon Personality Projile, there was a strong correlation between pre-expedition scores and change scores (r(63) = .76, p < .OOl). There were similar correlations, albeit not quite so high, for each individual scale.
Discussion The study provides evidence consistent with the proposition that short-term challenges such as those studied here may be capable of producing the kind of personality changes often claimed for them. These changes in personality were based on self-report measures. Though there is reasonable evidence for their validity (Gordon, 1978), there can be no guarantee that changes in self-report measures would be paralleled by observable changes in personality functioning. Incidentally, some validity of the self-report measure is indicated by the fact that the 14 per cent who did not complete the questionnaire on the second occasion had significantly lower responsibility scores on the first occasion. The fact that assessment of change could only be carried out on the 86 per cent of subjects who completed the questionnaire on both occasions may have produced a somewhat inflated estimate of the personality change that occurred in the total group (i.e. those who failed to complete the questionnaire on the second occasion may have changed less than the average of the group). However, given the magnitude of the changes, it is reasonable to assume that they would still have been significant had complete data been obtained. It should also be noted that the post-expedition questionnaire was completed immediately after the expedition, hence no information is available about how stable the measured changes were over time. It is also possible that the observed changes reflect a temporary change in mood state rather than an enduring personality change. However, it is doubtful whether the particular pattern of changes observed is what would be expected from mood change. For example, mood enhancement would not be expected to improve responsibility and cautiousness, but leave vigour and personal relations unchanged. Nevertheless, the contribution of mood changes to the observed pattern of questionnaire responses cannot be discounted. Changes in ascendancy (i.e. leadership) and responsibility are perhaps those that would be most expected by expedition organizers. The fact that some scales (for example, original thinking and personal relations) did not change argues against the possibility that the observed changes reflect only a general response set to report change by the end of the expedition. There was a consistent trend for females to show more positive personality change than males. This cannot be adequately explained in terms of lower baseline scores for females ; for example, females improved more on sociability despite having higher scores at the start of the expedition. Differences in baseline levels also cannot explain
Expedition stress
341
why only females tended to improve in vigour and personal relations, whereas males tended to deteriorate. It is possible that the kinds of demands made by the expedition were less familiar to females than to males, and this may have resulted in their having more impact on females. A number of previous studies have found women to be more susceptible to the negative effects of stress compared to men (e.g. Pearlin & Schooler, 1978). However, as noted by Cronkite & Moos (1984), studies of sex differences in response to positive influences are rare. It is thus noteworthy that women benefited more than men from the experience of the present expedition, suggesting that such differential positive effects should be examined in other contexts. The degree of personality change was strongly related to initial scores on personality measures. That is, it was those with the strongest qualities of ascendancy, emotional stability, sociability and responsibility who showed the most benefit in these areas. Such results might have implications for selection criteria for such organized expeditions (as might the finding that the use of avoidance strategies was significantly related to the degree of personality change). However, in this regard our results are limited by the considerations that (a) we examined changes on only a small number of personality measures, and thus have no information on what other possible positive changes may have resulted from the expedition, and (b) it is possible that other variables that we did not include may have been better predictors of change. Finally, since the present sample was already highly selected, it should not necessarily be expected that if such expeditions were made available to a broader cross-section of the population comparable benefits to those indicated here would be obtained. References Antonovsky, A. (1979). Health, Stress and Coping. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Cronkite, R. C. & Moos, R. H. (1984). The role of predisposing and moderating factors in the stress-illness relationship. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 25, 372-393. Folkman, S., Lazarus, R. S., Dunkel-Schetter, C., DeLongis, A. & Gruen, R. (1986). The dynamics of a stressful encounter : Cognitive appraisal, coping, and encounter outcomes. Journal of Personality and Social Pychology, 50, 992-1003. Gordon, L. V. (1978). Gordon Personal Projle Inventory. New York: Psychological Corporation. Lazarus, R. S. & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, Appraisal and Coping. New York: Springer. McCormick, I. A., Taylor, A. J., Rivolier, J. & Cazes, G. (1985). A psychometric study of stress and coping during the International Biomedical Expedition to the Antarctic (IBEA). Journal of Human Stress, 11, 150-156. Pearlin, L. I. & Schooler, C. (1978). The structure of coping. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 19, 2-21. Percy, M. (1989). Journey without an end. Geographical Magazine, 61, (4), 40-44. Received 14 December 1990; revised version received I5 August 1991
