Despite growing interest in resilience research, there is a notable gap in understanding the psychological characteristics predicting resilience in individuals who have experienced extreme adversity. The present study examines narratives of Ukrainian survivors of Soviet concentration camps, or GULAG (ГУЛАГ—Глaвное Управлeние исправительно-трудовых ЛАГерей, Main Directorate of Correctional Labour Camps). Our aim is to identify psychological characteristics that predict resilience in oppressive circumstances and to uncover unique motivational, cognitive, and social-personality factors associated with distinct resilience outcomes. By analyzing 95 survivor narratives using thematic content analysis, the study found that Achievement Motive, Integrative Complexity, and Identity Strength, particularly cultural identity, were positively associated with resilience. Additionally, scores for Integrative Complexity and Achievement Motive varied across different regions of Ukraine. The study enhances our understanding of human responses to adversity, highlighting the predictive capacities of motivations, cognitive factors, and social-personality aspects for psychological wellbeing. These insights could inform interventions and support strategies for survivors of the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine, as well as other contexts of extreme adversity. This study contributes to the scientific understanding of psychological states and outcomes through linguistic analysis, as well as the broader comprehension of human resilience and post-traumatic growth in challenging environments.

This chapter reports the results of a comparison between how presidents Trump and Biden think about other countries and their leaders, and how this relates to each president’s worldview and policies. The comparison is based on content analyses of presidential speeches, interviews, and other texts. Content analysis provides nonreactive measures of a cognitive process (integrative complexity), motivation (the needs for achievement, affiliation, and power), and emotion (psychological distance or closeness), both overall and with respect to specific nations. A separate analysis identifies changes in Trump’s rhetoric between findings published in 2021 and the current dataset. Cluster analysis is used to identify each president’s groupings of countries sharing similar relationships with the USA.