2015-16 Seminar Series

Exploring the psychological effects of the Greek financial crisis

Abstract

The seminar presented the results of a research project that investigated the emotional atmosphere during the financial crisis and the way it affected citizens’ emotions and behaviour. The project comprised three studies. In study I, two groups of participants watched every day images of crisis (homeless people, beggars, demonstrations etc.) and images of everyday life before the crisis, respectively; they then completed scales on hopelessness and political efficacy and vignettes on social problems and possible forms of action. The results showed that images of crisis affect citizens’ hope, political efficacy and intended action, possibly without awareness. Study II investigated how media contribute to the emotional atmosphere through the way they present humanitarian aspects of the crisis, possible causes and solutions. A total of six news websites and newspapers from a five year period (2009-2014) were content analyzed. Results showed that humanitarian issues were covered in a highly dramatized manner, without connections to the wider socio-economic context and with attributions of causes of suffering to individuals rather than institutions; collectivities formed to relieve pain and pressure created by the crisis (NGOs, church, neighborhood, non-formal groups etc.) were rarely mentioned, thus possibly contributing to citizens’ hopelessness and deadlock feeling. In study III, emotions generated by the financial crisis and the processes through which these emotions led (or did not lead) to forms of political and social action were investigated through in depth interviews with 50 participants of a wide range of ages and socio-economic backgrounds. Analysis of the interviews confirmed the distressing emotions generated by the crisis and the effect of the general emotional atmosphere created by media and political discourse as a source of public emotion. The interviews also unraveled the complex psychological mechanisms than intervene between emotion and political and social action. Overall, the studies confirmed the psychologically highly distressful emotional atmosphere in which Greeks live since the eruption of the crisis, the significant degree to which media and political discourse contribute to this atmosphere and the complex processes through which emotions are transformed to different forms of political and social behaviour.

Biography

Bettina Davou is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Laboratory for Psychological Applications and Communication Planning at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Department of Communication and Media Studies. She is Chartered Psychologist and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. She was born in Athens and studied applied psychology at Bishop’s University, Quebec, Canada (B.A. Hons.), and psychology of education (M.Sc.) and cognition (PhD) at the University of London, Institute of Education. While in London, she had clinical psychodynamic training in educational therapy from the Caspari Foundation and later on in Athens she received three years of training in children and adolescents’ psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Her research interests include the interaction of cognition and emotion, effects of non-conscious processes on human behaviour, cognitive and emotional parameters of mediated and interpersonal communication, and media education. She is the author (alone or in collaboration) of eight books and the editor of eleven volumes on issues related to her research interests, and has published many articles in Greek and international journals. Her most recent book is Conflict and Emotion in Interpersonal Relationships, Athens, Papazisis Publishers (2015).

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