Concordia 2023-2024

• Forschungsstelle: SBFI
• Projektnummer: P2023-UPD Concordia

Schlüsselwörter (Englisch)

Concordia Space Universitätsklinik für Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie SERI SBFI SEFRI

Kurzbeschreibung (Englisch)

Human space exploration, as planned by space agencies as well as enterprises in the private sector, will in the next future involve long-duration exploratory missions to the Moon and Mars. The crews will have to endure mission scenarios that will expose them to severe isolation and lack of rescue possibilities and will be confronted with extreme psychological and physiological conditions that humans have never faced before. The investigation of these issues is of highest priority for all the key players in the field in order to better understand the factors that could put such missions at peril and be able to implement counteracting measures. Isolation studies in extreme environments (i.e. polar regions) play a major role in pursuing this goal and probably represent the only mean to simulate the environment of a long-duration spaceflight mission. Since 2005 the European Space Agency (ESA) runs a multifaceted research programme at Concordia Station in Antarctica, which is one of the most isolated infrastructures in the world and therefore considered to be one of the most accurate Earth-based analogues for deep space missions. Investigated topics include sleep and circadian rhythms, stress responses, changes in immune system, individual well-being and crew performance.

Our study is designed to understand how individual psychological attributes and group dynamics influence team interactions in extreme work environments. Only excellent teams may succeed in exploring space in long-duration missions. Our aim is to understand critical interpersonal issues that arise during long-term isolation. We will investigate how loneliness impacts the development of feelings of suspiciousness and mistrust. These feelings represent symptoms of mild paranoid thinking and frequently lead to interpersonal conflict. Further, we will investigate how team reflexivity, a team's active reflection on their objectives, strategies and processes, promotes effective teamwork, minimizes team conflicts and optimizes team functioning. To achieve this goal, we will use advanced wearable sociometric badge technology. The badges will record face-to-face interaction and relative location of the crew. Using this non-intrusive sensor data, we will capture individual interactions, map team dynamics and correlate this data with self-assessed questionnaire measures.

This research project is the continuation of HD-ICE that has been implemented successfully with the 17th Concordia winter-over crew 2021 and financially supported by SERI. It has been selected from ESA for an additional data collection season during the 19th winter-over in 2023.

Projektziele (Englisch)

The project evaluates the impact of extreme environments and their related stressful conditions at the individual and group level. Our main goal is to quantitatively assess group behavior and social networks with proximity sensor data and subsequently relate this type of data with individual - perceived social isolation, paranoid thinking - and team variables - team reflexivity and team cohesion. These variables will be assessed with specific questionnaires.

- Increasing feelings of perceived social Isolation will be associated with, if present, symptoms of suspiciousness and mistrust, and in turn represent a risk factor for team conflicts. These feelings of isolation and mild paranoid thinking in the individual subject will be associated with individual behavioral sensor data and will be reflected in the team's social dynamics as assessed with sociometric badges.
- Team reflexivity is positively related with team cohesion and team performance and negatively related with team conflict. In particular teams who reflect more during their mission show higher team cohesion, higher mission success and less team conflicts. Different levels of team reflexivity will be associated with different social network patterns.
- Social network patterns can predict team cohesion and team conflict.