Iva Solcova

• Senior Researcher at The Czech Academy of Sciences

The objective of the present research was to study the dynamics of changes in emotional energy, work self-efficacy and perceived similarity in the crew of the Mars 520 experimental study. The study comprised six volunteers, all men, between 27-38 yr of age (M = 32.16; SD = 4.99). The Mars 520 experimental study simulated all the elements of the pro...

The success of a long-duration space mission depends on various technical demands as well as on the psychological (cognitive, affective, and motivational) adaptation of crewmembers and the quality of interactions within the crew. We examined the ways crewmembers of a 520-day simulated spaceflight to Mars (held in the Institute for Biomedical Proble...

Objectives. The present longitudinal study aims to find the links between (1) toddler temperament and adult resilience, and (2) recollections about parental styles and adult resilience among participants of longitudinal study. Sample and setting. The data from longitudinal project “Mental development of school children from various social environme...

Objectives. The study focused on relations between well-being and personality characteristics, values, social desirability, self-concept and self-determining needs in a sample of Czech college students. Methods. The analyses were conducted using Satisfaction with Life Scale, Schwartz Value Survey, Scales of Psychological Well-Being, Positive and Ne...

The project Mars 500 was the first long-term simulation of a manned flight to Mars. We examined the ways crew members described their experiences and their life during simulation, what they saw as key episodes and key topics in simulation, as well as key problems and key benefits. The aim of this paper is to present the Mars 500 simulation in its c...

This methodological chapter introduces the first phase of the research on reflectivity in social workers and nurses. It starts with an overview of important measuring scales which the team considered as important for the research. It documents and discusses how they were used, validated and adapted to result in the complex battery of items that cou...

Stress under extreme conditions can promote not only negative reactions but also prosocial behaviour or provision of protection and social support. This study presents research aimed at detecting the ‘tend-and-befriend’ stress response among crewmembers of the SIRIUS-19 international spaceflight simulation (120 days, 3 men, 3 women). Emotional ener...

The purpose of the present study was to explore personal growth and changes in values in crewmembers of two spaceflight simulation studies of different duration. The crewmembers were from different nations and of different cultural backgrounds. Stress-Related Growth Scale and Portrait Values Questionnaire were administered to crewmembers of SIRIUS-...

Studies on education generally find that higher education has a positive impact on various aspects of life. Nevertheless, studies focused on elderly people and their psychosocial health and development seldom view higher education as an important factor. Our aim was to explore the relation between higher education and ego integrity, a measure based...

Late adulthood and aging constitute the chief portion of the human lifespan, which has various societal, demographical, political, but also psychological consequences. Following the work of Erik H. Erikson, who stressed the task of attaining ego integrity in the final stage of human life, the present study examines and stresses various facets of eg...

The aim of this study was to examine both direct and indirect associations of the personality traits of extraversion, neuroticism and conscientiousness with life satisfaction through work engagement and job satisfaction. The study population consisted of 2229 academics (57.1% men) throughout Czech public universities, who completed a questionnaire...

The purpose of this study was to examine whether gender differences are revealed in work conditions of women and men faculty employed at Czech public universities.

The effects of changing academic environments on faculty well-being have attracted considerable research attention. However, few studies have examined the multifaceted relationships between the academic work environment and the multiple dimensions of faculty well-being using a comprehensive theoretical framework. To address this gap, this study imp...

The paper deals with Lars Tornstam’s Theory of Gerotranscendence. The author had been elaborating his theory for twenty years based on qualitative and quantitative research. Doing this he had in his mind, in particular, persons over the age of 85, i.e. persons in the fourth age, the oldest old. The aim of the article is to draw attention to the Tor...

Objective: The study examined the links between health-related indicators, adult resilience, and burnout. Method: The data were collected during two waves of the longitudinal study (in 2004-05, N=98, and 2011-12, N=88, respectively). Health behaviour, self-rated health (SRH), Sense of Coherence Scale (SOC), and Shirom-Melamed Burnout Measure (SM...

In the last few years, attention has been given not only to negative impacts of stressful conditions but also to possible positive outcomes. The present study was devoted to personal growth in two challenging conditions in two samples of participants coming from different nations and different cultural backgrounds. The study extends existing knowle...

This study examined both direct and indirect associations of faculty burnout with psychosocial work environments, using the job resources-demands framework. A sample of 2,229 faculty members (57.1% male) throughout public universities in the Czech Republic completed a questionnaire comprising measures of burnout and psychosocial work environment ch...

Objectives. The aim of the study was to test the psychometric properties of Czech version of the Shirom Melamed Burnout Measure (SMBM). Although this instrument has been translated to Czech language and used before, its validity has not yet been tested. Sample and settings. Representative sample of Czech working population has been used. The predef...

The contribution is devoted to new development of workforce in the CR and EU with the respect to its greying. Some measures that should be taken from the point of occupational gerontology are introduced. The article documents some attitudes and sterotypes associated with older workers by the Eurobarometer survey 2012. It turns attention to the conc...

The project Mars-500 was the first long-term simulation of a manned flight to Mars. We examined the ways crew members described their experiences and their life during simulation, what they saw as key episodes and key topics in simulation, as well as key problems and key benefits. The aim of this paper is to present the Mars-500 simulation in its c...

This study examines quality of academic worklife in Czech public universities to assess the extent to which the global drive towards marketisation in higher education has affected Czech academic staff. A total of 2229 academics (men = 57.1%) completed a survey measuring their job satisfaction, job stress, and work environment perceptions. Findings...

Aim: Our longitudinal study of successful development would not be complete without an analysis of the health-related aspects of this successful development. Method: A sample of 88 Czech adults (49 women, 39 men), participants of the Czech Longitudinal Study from 1956, was examined using a set of psychological methods and somato-physiological measu...

The study first introduces two essential theoretical concepts of well-being: subjective wellbeing and psychological well-being. The main focus of the study is on the analysis of the links between personality and well-being. In agreement with the present views on personality domains, the relationships between well-being and personality traits, chara...

Seven years after since publishing their overview study concerning resilience in this journal, the authors deal with the development of problems in the past time span. They occupy themselves with the incoming approaches to questions of resistance and with development of methods for assessing the level of resilience. They introduce the related const...

The chapter describes the design, realization, and results of a prospectively designed two-wave study, the goal of which was to verify the potential connections between burnout, selected psychosocial characteristics and the main known risks of cardiovascular diseases in a sample of economically active Czech men and women. Part of the project was an...

Over a prolonged period of time, psychology has not given adequate attention to the positive aspects of human life. It is quite understandable — psychology is the field of science whose main practical purpose is to help people, so it would, historically, rather embrace subjects basically dealing with painful human experiences. Psychologists tried t...

This multinational study simultaneously tested three prominent hypotheses—universal disposition, cultural relativity, and livability—that explained differences in subjective well-being across nations. We performed multilevel structural equation modeling to examine the hypothesized relationships at both individual and cultural levels in 33 nations....

This article addresses the relationship between the work environment and the well-being of academic faculties in public Czech universities. It presents findings from a pilot study conducted at a Faculty of Arts at a major Czech university. The aims of the study were to describe the Faculty's work environment and to examine the impact of specific wo...

The article deals with positive personal transformations in a simulated space mission. The investigation was focused on the aspects of control locus, stamina, proactive behavior to overcome challenges, and stress-related personal growth. Besides, ingenious psychophysiological techniques designed to select Russian cosmonauts were used for assessing...

The paper brings the overview of latest knowledge published in studies on burnout syndrome and related constructs. It deals with links between burnout syndrome and socio-economic context. The study focuses especially on related knowledge from the field of work, work stress, and organizational psychology. It discusses the latest research results con...

The paper presents the bibliometric analysis of production of the journal Ceskoslovenska psychologie as it is available in the citation data-basis Web of Science. The analyses apply to three overlapping periods of the development of the journal, namely to (1) general production of the journal as it is registered in the data-basis Web of Science, i....

Some of the concepts of resilience published to date have interpreted its meaning as the ability to adapt in the face of risk, but other authors point out that resilience does not always have to mean "invulnerability", and that it should be examined not only as an individual quality and aptitude, but also as a developmental process involving person...

The paper brings the preliminary results of the study (N = 87), the goal of which was to describe the psychological factors applying in the contexts of contemporary economic recession. The economic recession was operationalized by the data of unemployment rate at the time of study. Its impact was assessed by methods designated for capturing the fin...

Stress in medical practice has always been a topical issue. This is partly because medical service involves taking care of other peoples’ lives and mistakes or errors could be costly and sometimes irreversible. It is thus expected that the medical doctor himself must be in a perfect state of mind devoid of morbid worries and anxieties. This is howe...

The purpose of the present study was to explore the relationships among the four widely studied constructs related to personality resilience: sense of coherence, hardiness, locus of control, and self-efficacy. Despite the prominence of these traits and rather obvious associations between them, relatively few investigations have explicitly considere...

The first prototypical models of resilience, which emerged from early philosophical and psychological thinking, are represented by voluntarists who emphasized strength of will as a distinct human quality. Later, it turned out that relations of far greater complexity are involved, in that besides will and motivation, personality characteristics, apt...

Objectives. The study reports the results of Czech version of Proactive Coping Inventory (PCI) in the elderly. The results of PCI subscales were compared to the cognitive performance in memory and attention domains. Subjects and setting. The sample included 257 community-dwelling senior citizens from Prague region. The Czech version of Proactive Co...

Psychosocial aspects of aging I. Solcova The paper offers an overview of new findings related to aging and old age. The author describes negative stereotypes about aging and old age and draws attention to the latest findings of differential gerontology. The author focuses on so-called successful aging and its self-assessment. She describes the expe...

The paper deals with some methodological pitfalls of longitudinal research from the initial sample, determining the appropriate length of the examination, timing of data collection, controlling for effects not included in the research, to personnel matters related to ensuring the progress of longitudinal investigations. Problems related to results...

The paper describes the design, realization, and results of prospectively designed two-wave study the goal of which was to verify the potential connections of burnout, selected psychosocial characteristics and main known risks of cardiovascular diseases in the sample of economicaly active Czech men and women. A part of the project was the intervent...

First experience with two instruments - AWLS (overview of spheres of work life, M. P. Leiter) and MBI-GS (Maslach's burnout inventory) in Czech health and social institutions are presented. The goal of the research was to describe the relation of employee and employer as an indicator of organizational culture and its impact on satisfaction and ment...

The paper deals with a study carried out in an interesting research sample and with a seemingly easy-to-prove hypothesis. Because of certain circumstances that were not taken into consideration at the beginning of the research, the results were different than expected. The author is re-examining the results and conclusions of the study that can be...

The paper informs about the history of psychological space research in Czechoslovakia and in the Czech Republic. The origins of aerospace research date back to the 1970s and were related to Interkosmos program. The paper details research carried out within its frame, focusing namely on the study of astronaut's personality and his/her psychological...

The study was carried out as a part of international study addressing the well-being of university students. The results of the Czech sample (N=535) brought some interesting relations of well-being to self-determining needs (competence, autonomy, relationality) to conformity, safety, and benevolence of Schwartz value survey and to independency in s...

In connection with the forthcoming simulations of the flight to Mars the problem of crews selection and preparation to work and stay in inhospitable conditions of long-lasting flights emerges again. The paper represents an attempt to summarize the most important available present knowledge gained from space flights and their simulations, and simila...

The authors consider the definition of resilience as a multidimensional phenomenon conditioned by multiple factors. The authors find useful to view resilience as a fuzzy set consisting of personally, socially, and physically based resources, some of which are central for resilience, some rather marginal, and some belong simultaneously into differen...

Ten years after the publication of their overview study concerning the burnout syndrome in this journal, the authors deal with the development of the topic during the past time. They attend to positive antipoles of burnout syndrome as they were elaborated by American, European, and Israeli experts. They present the related constructs, namely the vi...

The Study aims to present the contemporary philosophical view of health and illness. After a brief look into history and different Cultures it attends to the taxonomy of definitions of health and introduces some contemporary definitions of health or illness from distinguished authors together with the critique that was evoked by the given definitio...

Submitted study summarizes the experience with Czech version of Proactive Coping Inventory (PCI) tested on a medium-size student sample (N=176). According to the results, the inventory items are perceived similarly by the Czech subjects, and also the psychometric properties of the inventory are comparable with the original version. Because of the i...

The research objective of the two studies was to determine the predictors of self-rated health. In the first study (executed in two waves with an intermission of 4 - 5 years, N = 2638, N = 1708) were selected as independent variables: demographic data, hardiness, neuroticism, social desirability, introversion/extroversion, and life events within th...

The history of research dedicated to behavior types gets over almost fifty years. The paper offers an overview about the latest development of research focused on behavior types, personality types and their relation to health. It addresses especially to the knowledge connected with type A behavior, type C behavior and type D personality. It concern...

The goal of the study is to make readers acquainted with the newest development of knowledge concerning the relation of aggression and self-esteem and to correct or complete the picture of given issue that is still often presented to public, namely that aggression is typically committed by persons with low self-esteem. The current studies show that...

In a representative sample of Czech adult population (N = 1321) ageing 18-74 years the data concerning well-being (satisfaction with life), self-reported health, locus of control, level of self-efficacy and socio-demographic data were accumulated by the means of questionnaire survey. The logistic regression analysis (stepwise method) was executed t...

Positive psychology got over - since the time of its origin - the second wave of principal publications. Since 2000, the arguments of critics of this movement also crystallized and surely it is worth to call attention of Czech and Slovak professional community to some of them, too. In the paper, the core of controversy of so-called positive psychol...

A sample of Czech entrepreneurs (n = 222) was compared to the population sample with respect to subjective health status, stress-buffering factors, and health-related behaviors. Our findings show that 1) entrepreneurs assess their health state more favorably and 2) have a higher level of health-protective factors at their disposal in comparison wit...

Leung and colleagues have revealed a five-dimensional structure of social axioms across individuals from five cultural groups. The present research was designed to reveal the culture level factor structure of social axioms and its correlates across 41 nations. An ecological factor analysis on the 60 items of the Social Axioms Survey extracted two f...

Objectives: The data concerning socioeconomic inequalities in health, presented at the previous EHPS Conference in Lisbon, is compared results with the new results from the two-year follow-up survey. Methods: A representative sample of Czech adult population obtained by random quota sampling completed (by structured interview) data on self-reported...

Extended spaceflight represents a potent psychosocial Stressor. As the crew selection criteria have been sharpened over the years of experience, the effects of stressful conditions are rather subtle. Moreover, the crew members tend to deny their real feelings. For that reason it seems necessary to employ some measures of indirect assessment of poss...

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The study brings an overview of development of opinions on the nature of well-being. It makes an effort to terminological and content clearing in this field regarding the up to now lasting overlapping with many related concepts, taking into account the developmental sources of possible differentiation between related concepts in the ancient psychol...

In a sample of Czech population (N=2638), data concerning social support, social network, socio-demographic descriptions, and selected personality characteristics were collected. The logistic regression analysis was executed (step method) to assess predictors of social support and social network. As predictors of social support - according to the r...

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The psychology of health pays in recent years considerable attention not only to personality factors but also to the social context of the individual, his place in social structures and his socio-economic status (SES). The position of a man in the social hierarchy and the associated material, behavioural and psychosocial factors may be significant...

The submitted paper informs on current results of international research focused on search for trans-culturally universal dimensions of general beliefs about functioning of man in society (so-called social axioms). The authors briefly present five factors that resulted in various cultures reward for application, spirituality, social flexibility, fa...

Unemployment which is associated with social, psychological, behavioural and health problems cannot be considered (on humane as well as economic grounds) a purely personal matter, a problem or the state of an individual, but a serious social issue the adequate solution of which is in the intel est of society as a whole. Unemployment creates inequal...

Social support is a multidimensional concept. So far not all its dimensions were investigated nor their part in conjunction with stress and disease. Above all in investigations of the essence of action of the social support process the wider social context where this process takes place must not be neglected. Despite the fact that the statement on...

The effect of stress on the immune system is an area where, beyond any doubt, it is possible to provide evidence of the psychological modulation of immunity. It is, however, also an area where different authors recorded different results. In the submitted paper the authors present the hypothesis of Evans et al. (1997) on the relationship between st...

The burnout syndrome has become during the last 25 years a much investigated variable in research, in particular in the USA and Canada, but later also in Europe and worldwide. It is beyond doubt an important psychological and medical problem with an impact on the quality of life of afflicted subjects and also on their performance. The submitted pap...

Total work load is a sum of load represented by paid and unpaid work (unpaid work are duties related to home and family into which - apart from care about children -also care about aging parents is included, as well as work related to the run of the household, care about car, garden, financial problems, etc.). It is usually given in number of hours...

A Mars manned space mission would be characterized by long-lasting psycho-social stress for its human participants. Based on the results of our and other authors' experiments with small human groups under simulated space stress conditions, and bearing in mind historical evidence of the changing role of women in human society, the differences of fem...

Psychosocial stress has become an inseparable companion of contemporary man and it may act as the trigger mechanism for what the term chronic non-infectious diseases" is used nowadays. However, the same stress leads in different subjects to different consequences. The differences can be explained to a considerable extent by moderating (mediating) f...

The study gives an overview of knowledge of current world literature about psychosocial stress in women. It deals with the total work load of women and with the demands that are resulting from their multiple roles. It compares the knowledge about reactions of women and men on stressors and about the differences in coping with stress. The study pick...

The aim of cosmic biology is to create conditions necessary for the long-term stay of man on cosmic orbital complexes and planetary stations. Such conditions should be provided by the autonomous closed ecosystem--a simplified model of the terrestrial biocenosis. As an experimental model of the higher heterotrophic link of this ecosystem the Japanes...

A Czech translation of the short form McGill Pain Questionnaire was tested in a group of patients suffering from pain of vertebrogenic origin. The results support the hypothesis that the questionnaire will be an asset in various disciplines of medical practice. While taking up little time it provides a comprehensive and valid picture of the quality...

A number of studies has been published in recent years on the positive effect of regular excercise, especially in the area of primary preventive and therapeutic cardiological programs (e.g. Wiklund 1984, Masironi a Denolin 1985, Wilson et al. 1980). Optimalizing effect of physical excercise on the mood state is well documented too. The importan...

An increase of performance of six experienced pilots in a complex in-flight aerobatics test repeated after a period of alternating zero-hypergravity conditions, lasting for 30 minutes, was observed, if compared with the same test before such exposition. There was no difference in the increase of the pilot performance, if the in-flight test was repe...

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