To-date, there has been no international review of mental health resilience training during Basic Training nor an assessment of what service members perceive as useful from their perspective. In response to this knowledge gap, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Human Factors & Medicine Research & Technology Task Group "Mental Health Training" initiated a survey and interview with seven to twenty recruits from nine nations to inform the development of such training (N = 121). All nations provided data from soldiers joining the military as volunteers, whereas two nations also provided data from conscripts. Results from the volunteer data showed relatively consistent ranking in terms of perceived demands, coping strategies, and preferences for resilience skill training across the nations. Analysis of data from conscripts identified a select number of differences compared to volunteers. Subjects also provided examples of coping with stress during Basic Training that can be used in future training; themes are presented here. Results are designed to show the kinds of demands facing new recruits and coping methods used to overcome these demands to develop relevant resilience training for NATO nations.

No abstract

In this study, soldiers' adaptation with the situational demands on combat deployment is explored. Certain changes on the level of two needs-based personality characteristics, Sensation Seeking (SS) and Need for Structure (NS) take place across deployment: soldiers who are lower in SS were more inclined to seek for sensations after deployment, and soldiers at the extremes of the NS dimension, modified their behavioral tendencies after deployment towards a moderate level. According to our findings, these changes suggest at least temporal characteristic adaptations with certain environmental demands. We discuss the implications of these findings for research and practice.Soldiers' life during deployment is full of strains that range from environmental to physiological factors (Kavanagh

In this article, we explore the role of two narrow personality traits, Sensation Seeking and Need for Structure, in soldiers’ situational perception in a military task‐environment. In the first study, we assess the psychometric qualities of the personality inventories, Sensation Seeking Scale‐V and Personal Need for Structure, in an Estonian military sample. In the second study, we explore how these traits are related to soldiers’ perception of complexity (predictability) and potential harms involved (riskiness; defined as situation structure) in two field exercise tasks. We found that both of the explored personality traits are significantly and inversely related with soldiers’ perception of situation structure in a military environment. Implications for personnel selection, training, and performance of military organizations are discussed.

The huge growth in expenditure on counter‐extremism and counter‐terrorism policy post 9/11 (Dawson & Guinnessy, 2002; Lum, Kennedy, & Sherley, 2006; Silke, 2004) has seen buzzwords such as “resilience” integrated without clear framing or the underpinning of empirical evidence. The issue addressed by the current study is twofold: the framing of resilience within policy is not such that it clearly relates to extremism and, the subsequent lack of understanding that exists on the relationships between the 3 levels of resilience under this framing. The National Resilience Scale (Kimhi, Goroshit, & Eshel, 2013) is applied alongside measures of community and individual resilience to test the hypothesis that all three levels would positively correlate with one another. The hypothesis was supported in study 1, but not study 2, with community resilience negatively correlating with both individual and national resilience. The implications of this conceptual framework are discussed, primarily the impact on contemporary policy, specifically around extremism and terrorism.