Antarctic Winter-Over Syndrome

When starting each academic year, I give a lecture presenting the methodological status of psychology as a science, which includes: subject, methods, purpose and sources of cognition. Contemporary psychology currently considers human behavior as its subject, both in everyday life situations as well as those extreme, where both one’s own experience and that of others depend on the person. In this book on the behavior of polar explorers presented to the Reader, we are generally dealing with extreme situations, taking into account their new living conditions found on the Fifth Continent, as Antarctica is called precisely because of the specificity of its climate and the accompanying natural phenomena.

The conditions of human life in the Antarctic, in particular during the Antarctic winter, can be described as having typical features of a man’s struggle for survival against the element. In such a situation the members of the Third Antarctic Expedition of the Polish Academy of Sciences, who in the years 1978–1979 wintered in a 21-person group at the Henryk Arctowski Polish Antarctic Station on King George Island, in the South Shetland archipelago, who were described in this book. Their daily work: scientific, technical, medical, service, psychological, photojournalistic, film-making, cleaning, construction and cooking. was performed in conditions of permanent polar stress with features of a fight against the elements of Antarctica, just as miner’s daily work has features of fighting against the elements in a mine, and sailor’s and fisherman’s daily work is a fight against the elements of the sea.

It is also worth noting that the vast majority of the patterns of sensory and social deprivation known in the psychological literature come from experimental research, e.g. the famous McGill University experiment on “total” deprivation of external stimuli reported by McKeachie et al. (1976). In view of this type of research, objections of a moral nature were raised at the time, because of the serious psychological consequences of such experiments. Therefore, in this context, the method of participatory observation, which was undertaken by Prof. J. Terelak who took part in the work of the team of polar explorer and carried out not only his own longitudinal psychological research of the polar explorers during their wintering over in Antarctica, but also, on the basis of his observations, introspective-retrospective narration of selected aspects of observed events of psychological significance. In my opinion, these narratives are a valuable source of knowledge for empirical psychology on the behavior of people in the extreme Antarctic conditions, especially during the Antarctic winter, when the group of Polish polar explorers worked. In these extreme conditions the medical service of the Arctowski Station on King George Island did not retreat from providing assistance to deep-sea vessels in cases of emergency, performing effective surgical interventions on Polish fishermen.

The book by Prof. Jan Terelak features a number of original and fascinating introspective-retrospective narratives presented in a manner which motivates to continue reading about the life and scientific work of Polish scientists/polar explorers and about the beautiful yet harsh and vibrant nature of Antarctica. His journal of polar events published in book form has a great heuristic potential, not only for psychologists who are focused on describing human behavior in new and extreme situations, but also for all those who constantly rediscover themselves.

Lublin, 12 March 2020 Prof. Adam Biela

 Maria Curie-Skłodowska University

 Institute of Psychology

The use of the Antarctic expedition and the related winter-over syndrome to show a potential long-term space mission as an extreme situation is formally a procedure that is most justified from a scientific and cognitive point of view. Although extreme situations, like the expedition to Mars, are unpredictable, the anatomy of the spectrum of human experiences taking place in it is possible in certain ranges. Antarctic expeditions are a good analogy to long-lasting space expeditions, because systematic medical and psychological observations carried out on them give an idea of the scale of difficulties that every human being and every task force inevitably and irrevocably faces when confronted eye to eye with them. On the basis of, among other things, Prof. J. Terelak’s research and psychological observations, we learn, on the one hand, that one can prepare for many existential events – accompanying long-term isolation in an environment closed to an extremely hostile external environment – by training skills and attitudes. On the other hand, however, we also learn that in the face of extreme environmental pressures, so unforeseen and so extreme events inevitably occur that nothing can be done about them and no previous a priori attitudes will change anything. Knowledge, including the scientific knowledge that people bring with them in extreme situations and environments becomes completely useless when the level of objective pressures exceeds the limits of adaptation. The scenario showing this process on the example of Prof. Terelak’s account illustrates the powerlessness of psychological knowledge in moderating the borderline situation of Antarctic isolation. In my opinion, this moment is the key argument for using the natural experiment for scientific purposes, to show the essence of the phenomenon of experts losing their expert power to explain human behavior in a borderline situation.