The Influence of a Long Voyage on Mental Status: An Experimental Study

Objective: The current study aimed to explore how did the long voyage affect the mental status in the experimental environment and construct a quantitative relation model of the mental status during a long voyage. Method: To investigate participants’ mental health state during a long simulated long voyage, 12 participates were equally divided into three groups and were instructed to live in a simulated sailing cabin. The cabin provided a narrow and closed space and a social isolation environment. Symptom checklist-90 (SCL-90), Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2) were adopted to evaluate participates’ anxiety, depression, somatic symptoms and sleep, fatigue and stress status respectively before and after the long voyage. The positive effect and negative affect schedule (PANAS) was used to investigate the daily change of positive and negative emotions in the whole simulated voyage period. These three measurements reveal the change of mental status from different perspectives before, during, after a long voyage. Results: The pretest scores of somatization were lower than the post-test scores of somatization on SCL-90.The post-test T-scores of depression and paranoia were significantly higher than those of pretest(P < 0.05) on MMPI. The change of the positive emotion could be described as a quadratic polynomial model, and the change of the negative emotion could be described as a cubic polynomial model. Conclusions: The long voyage had a significant influence on participants’ state of mind and mood, which resulted in increased negative emotion and declined positive emotion, and brought out depression and Paranoia. The positive and negative emotions showed different trends during the long term simulated voyage and different starting times of recovery, but the time of positive emotions recovering to the level of baseline after the voyage was very close to the recovery time of negative emotions after the voyage.