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There is scarce evidence of a relationship between positive and psychosomatic characteristics. This study aimed to examine the associations of somatic burden with psychological resources such as optimism, resilience, and general self-efficacy. Russian participants (n = 1020) completed measures of psychological resources at Time 1 and somatic symptoms at Time 2. The results showed that somatic burden decreased with greater levels of optimism, resilience, and general self-efficacy. Regarding health and sociodemographic characteristics, female sex increased somatic burden in the model with optimism scores, university education decreased somatic burden in the model with resilience scores, and history of COVID-19 disease increased somatic burden in the models with optimism, resilience, and general self-efficacy scores. This study has theoretical and practical contributions. It combines positive psychology and psychosomatic medicine and highlights the value of psychological resource interventions in the treatment and prevention of somatic burden. These findings may be useful for scientists, clinicians, and practitioners.

Somatic burden has become one of the most common psychological reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide. This study examined the prevalence of somatic burden, latent profiles, and associated factors of somatic symptoms during the pandemic in a large sample of Russians. We used cross-sectional data from 10,205 Russians collected during October-December, 2021. Prevalence of somatic burden was assessed with the Somatic Symptom Scale-8. Latent profiles of somatic burden were identified using latent profile analysis. Multinomial logistic regression was used to examine demographic, socioeconomic, and psychological associated factors of somatic burden. Over one-third (37%) of the Russians reported being somatised. We selected the three-latent profile solution with high somatic burden profile (16%), medium somatic burden profile (37%), and low somatic burden profile (47%). The associated factors of greater somatic burden were female gender, lower education, history of COVID-19 disease, refusing vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 infection, poorer self-rated health, greater fear of COVID-19 pandemic, and living in regions with higher excess mortality. Overall, this study contributes to knowledge about the prevalence, latent profiles, and associated factors of somatic burden during the COVID-19 pandemic. It can be useful to researchers in psychosomatic medicine and practitioners in the health care system.

Background: Little is known about the COVID-19 impact on Russian medical, psychology and social work students’ psycho-emotional well-being, substance use and resilience. Methods: More than 2000 helping profession students, 75.4% female, participated in an online survey about COVID-19 impact at a peak time of infection (October/November 2020). The Fear of COVID-19 Scale (FCV-19S) and Brief Resilience Scale (BRS) were used for study purposes. Furthermore, the influence of COVID-19 on student psycho-emotional well-being and substance use (i.e., tobacco and alcohol) was examined. Results: Medical, female and religious students reported higher fear values. Social work students reported more current substance use, including binge drinking (five or more drinks on one particular occasion). Students who reported COVID-19 associated with their psycho-emotional well-being had higher fear values. Regarding resilience, no association was found based on the student study area. However, male and non-religious students reported more resilience. Students who reported substance use and psycho-emotional problems had lower resilience values. Conclusion: COVID-19 fear and substance use differs among Russian students based on background characteristics. including gender, religiosity and study area. The FCV-19S and the BRS were found to be reliable instruments for research of COVID-19-related psycho-emotional problems, substance use and resilience. Study findings have implications for “front line” helping profession students in terms of education, training and intervention, in support of promoting their ability to address difficult conditions resulting from the pandemic and other disaster conditions in the future.

Approximately 350,000 foreign students, mostly from India, study medicine in Eastern Europe (EE). However, there is a dearth of information about the COVID-19 impact on this population who study at universities in Eastern Europe (e.g., Russia, Ukraine and Belarus). The aim of this study was to examine the pandemic impact on such students and to generate useful information that may be applied to their health, well-being and learning experience. A cross-sectional survey of Indian students at a Russian medical university was conducted. The data collection instrument included questions about background characteristics, fear of COVID-19, burnout, mental distress, eating behavior, substance use, resilience and adherence to World Health Organization prevention recommendations. Male and female students were compared to determine the COVID-19 impact based on gender status. A total of 497 students participated in this study. Among the survey participants, 92.3% reported being vaccinated. No significant difference was found among male and female respondents regarding fear and burnout associated with COVID-19. Approximately 40% of the students reported a deterioration in psycho-emotional well-being due to COVID-19, and such students had higher levels of COVID-19-related fear, burnout, substance use and lower resilience. Nearly half of the respondents reported unhealthy eating behavior (49.7%) and weight gain (46.3%) associated with COVID-19. In addition, students who adhered to prevention measures of mask wearing and social distancing had less COVID-19 fear and burnout, as well as more resilience. This study promotes an understanding of the impact of COVID-19 on the psycho-emotional conditions of male and female medical students from India studying abroad.

Twenty-three scientists met at Krobielowice, Poland to discuss the role of growth, nutrition and economy on body size. Contrasting prevailing concepts, re-analyses of studies in Indonesian and Guatemalan school children with high prevalence of stunting failed to provide evidence for an association between nutritional status and body height. Direct effects of parental education on growth that were not transmitted via nutrition were shown in Indian datasets using network analysis and novel statistical methods (St. Nicolas House Analysis) that translate correlation matrices into network graphs. Data on Polish children suggest significant impact of socioeconomic sensitivity on child growth, with no effect of maternal money satisfaction. Height and maturation tempo affect the position of a child among its peers. Correlations also exist between mood disorders and height. Secular changes in height and weight varied across decades independent of population size. Historic and recent Russian data showed that height of persons whose fathers performed manual work were on average four cm shorter than persons whose fathers were high-degree specialists. Body height, menarcheal age, and body proportions are sensitive to socioeconomic variables. Additional topics included delayed motherhood and its associations with newborn size; geographic and socioeconomic indicators related to low birth weight, prematurity and stillbirth rate; data on anthropometric history of Brazil, 1850-1950; the impact of central nervous system stimulants on the growth of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder; and pituitary development and growth hormone secretion. Final discussions debated on reverse causality interfering between social position, and adolescent growth and developmental tempo.

Social and psychological adaptation in a new country can be more or less successful depending on a number of factors. Research into behavioral patterns of migrants residing in Russia has revealed differences in their acculturation strategies and other expressions of migrant ethnic identity. These is a noticeable dependence on types of migrant settlement which can be compact or widespread. Local host population also demonstrates an unequal attitude toward compactly and diffusely settled migrants. This paper describes an attempt to find and analyze correlations between the length of residing in a new ethno-cultural environment, involvement in regional ethnic communities, contact with the host population, and ethnic identity. Differences in adaptation strategies develop three main ethnic identity models. Each model reflects general indicators of migrant adjustability to a new environment and new life.

The paper is devoted to the task of searching for mentions of green practices in social media texts. The relevance of this task is dictated by the need to expand existing knowledge about the use of green practices in society and the spread of existing green practices. This paper uses a text corpus consisting of the texts published on the environmental communities of the VKontakte social network. The corpus is equipped with an expert markup of the mention of nine types of green practices. As part of this work, a semi-automatic approach is proposed to the collection of additional texts to reduce the class imbalance in the corpus. The approach includes the following steps: detecting the most frequent words for each practice type; automatic collecting texts in social media that contain the detected frequent words; expert verification and filtering of collected texts. The four machine learning models are compared to find the mentions of green practices on the two variants of the corpus: original and augmented using the proposed approach. Among the listed models, the highest averaged F1-score (81.32%) was achieved by Conversational RuBERT fine-tuned on the augmented corpus. Conversational RuBERT model was chosen for the implementation of the application prototype. The main function of the prototype is to detect the presence of the mention of nine types of green practices in the text. The prototype is implemented in the form of the Telegram chatbot.