Associations of humor, morale, and unit cohesion on posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms

ABSTRACT

Military personnel experience many stressors during deployments that can lead to symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, not all military personnel who are exposed to deployment stressors develop PTSD symptoms. Recent research has explored factors that contribute to military personnel resilience, a multifaceted and multidetermined construct, as a means to mitigate and prevent PTSD symptoms. Much of this research has focused on the effects of individual-level factors (e.g., use of coping strategies like humor, the morale of individual unit members), with some research focusing on unit-level factors (e.g., the cohesiveness of a unit). However, there is little research exploring how these factors relate to each other in mitigating or reducing PTSD symptoms. In this study, we examined the association between deployment stressors, perceived unit cohesion, morale, humor, and PTSD symptoms in a sample of 20,901 active-duty military personnel using structural equation modeling. Results indicated that perceived unit cohesion, humor, and morale were positively associated with each other and negatively associated with PTSD symptoms over and above the effect of deployment stressors. These findings highlight the influence of resilience factors on PTSD symptoms beyond their substantial overlap and have implications for future research as well as the potential development of interventions for military personnel.

KEYWORDS:

• Unit cohesion
• morale
• posttraumatic stress disorder
• resilience factors
• military

Acknowledgments

This publication is based on public use data from the Army Study to Assess Risk and Resilience in Servicemembers (Army STARRS). The data are available from the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan (http://doi.org/10.3889/ICPSR35197.v2). The contents of this publication are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Army STARRS investigators, funders, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

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Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health [U01MH087981].