Cultural Differences and Migrant Mental Health in the Age of COVID-19

Dear Colleagues,

The profound global economic and social crisis that the COVID-19 pandemic represented has created the need for a new, more thorough study of, it would seem, previously well-studied questions. Among them is the complex of problems related to the influence on the human psyche of a long stay in a different cultural and ethnic environment. How different were the psycho-emotional reactions to the pandemic from different cultures and ethnic groups? How different were the psycho-emotional reactions of indigenous people and immigrant workers from different countries? How much variation was there in the psycho-emotional state of people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds compared to the pre-pandemic era? How quickly did they adapt to the new critical conditions? How did the psycho-emotional response to the pandemic by immigrants include differences in living standards and lifestyles with the native population and less access to healthcare and other public services? It would, of course, be wrong to limit the study to the differences in the behavior of the native population and immigrants. It is also extremely important to identify commonalities in their psycho-emotional reactions, as well as to search for the reasons for these similarities. The spread of the anti-vaccination movement in both developing and developed countries, for example, has become a problem that urgently needs to be explained scientifically. What made people not only of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, but also of very different educational, economic, and social backgrounds, unite around this rather strange and absurd myth? The answer to this question will help to explain much in the behavior of modern humans. Paradoxically, the pandemic not only raised new questions for science but also opened new possibilities for it by placing people in very unusual conditions. It became, in a way, a grandiose worldwide socio-economic experiment. Such an opportunity to look at old, well-known problems in the condition and behavior of huge masses of people from a new perspective does not occur for every generation of scientists. How has the scientific community taken advantage of it? Finding an answer to this question is another reason why MDPI has begun to collect material for this Topic. 

Prof. Dr. Vsevolod Konstantinov
Dr. Andrés Alexis Ramírez Coronel
Topic Editors