ABSTRACT
Chapter 17 presents the results of exploratory comparative studies of survival messages in American, Russian, and E. Ukrainian samples. Studying the impact of historical trauma (and especially the complex trauma of totalitarianism) is complicated by the cumulative errors and biases of cultural learning and the confounding cultural or current political and socioeconomic influence. In the absence of reliable information, life lessons or survival messages can become a pathway that directly connects us with the past. The four-phase study used a survival messages questionnaire to identify the most common survival messages and examine their prevalence in different cultural contexts. The results demonstrated the cultural universality of messages about general hardship and the specificity of messages to histories of societal dysfunction. In a crisis situation, the survival priority changes, those messages that encourage long-term planning are abandoned for the sake of immediate survivorship, and using any help becomes a priority. A comparison of messages received from parents and passed on to children established that patterns of transmission of survival information can be affected by social and political processes and can also affect them.
