Social Psychological Responses to Crises and Threats

Crises such as armed conflicts, mass displacement, environmental disasters, and political upheaval confront individuals and communities with acute uncertainty, perceived threat, and demands for collective response. Social psychological research has long examined related phenomena — including threat perception, attitude formation, intergroup conflict, collective action, and coping — but these have largely developed as separate literatures. Growing global instability has renewed urgency around integrating these streams. Recent work on climate anxiety, democratic backsliding, refugee attitudes, and protest movements highlights the breadth of contexts in which social psychological processes operate, yet whether common mechanisms cut across these contexts — particularly in how people form attitudes, develop trust, maintain well-being, and decide whether to act — remains an open and important question.Crises and threats — whether political, social, environmental, or conflict-driven — are defining features of contemporary life, yet social psychology lacks a unified account of how people respond to them. Do individuals and groups respond to different types of crises in fundamentally similar ways, or do context-specific factors produce meaningfully different responses? This Research Topic aims to explore the similarities and differences in social psychological responses across diverse crisis and threat contexts, with a view to identifying common underlying psychological mechanisms. We are particularly interested in how people form attitudes and trust, how they respond behaviorally — through action or inaction — across multiple social and political domains, and how crises and threats affect psychological well-being, self-esteem, resilience, and coping. By bringing these literatures into dialogue, we hope to advance a more integrative theoretical framework that can reveal what is universal in human responses to threat and what is shaped by the nature, source and severity of the crisis itself, as well as the specific cultural and sociopolitical milieu. Furthermore, we seek to understand how these diverse contexts interact with individual and group identities to shape varied psychological outcomes.This Research Topic welcomes empirical contributions, qualitative or quantitative, examining social psychological responses across a range of crisis contexts, including armed conflict and war, migration and emigration, protests and social movements, and political and environmental crises. We are particularly interested in studies that speak to the question of common versus context-specific psychological mechanisms, and that address one or more of the following themes: threat perception and appraisal; attitude formation and change in crisis contexts; policy preferences; collective action and inaction across social and political domains; intergroup dynamics under conditions of stress or conflict; social and political trust; and psychological well-being, self-esteem, resilience, and coping in the face of crises and threats. We welcome original research articles. Contributions that take a cross-national or comparative approach, or that examine understudied populations and contexts, are especially encouraged. Topic editors: Doron Shultziner, Keren Levy Ganany Snider, Selin Bengi Gumrukcu Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/79893/social-psychological-responses-to-crises-and-threats