While the correlation was most pronounced amongst female college students in non-STEM related fields, it showed up in the general population as well, though the lead author of the research paper, Oskari Lahtinen, explained that the propensity of "woke" people to be less mentally well could simply be due to the fact that they're on the political left, which has long been associated with higher rates of the aforementioned ailments.
According to the research paper, published in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology on March 14, participants were asked to respond to a number of statements to measure where they landed on a critical social justice attitude scale.
Among the statements were: "If white people have on average a higher level of income than black people, it is because of racism;" "University reading lists should include fewer white or European authors; "Microaggressions should be challenged often and actively;" "We don’t need to talk more about the color of people's skin;" "Trans* women who compete with women in sports are not helping women’s rights;" and "A member of a privileged group can adopt features or cultural elements of a less privileged group." The latter two were reverse scored.
The first study surveyed 851 adults, most of whom were associated with the university. It found that "higher [CSJAS] scores were weakly correlated with depression, anxiety, and lack of happiness in students," while in faculty and non-academic respondents the correlation was "very weak."
The second study, which surveyed 5,030 people across the country aged 15-84 via the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper, revealed similar results.
There was a marked difference along gender lines when it came to seeing "woke" ideas as positive; three out of five women did, compared to just one out of seven men.
Lahtinen warned that while the findings were accurate for Finnish participants, they should not be extrapolated to other countries, namely the United States, where "woke" ideas have been around longer and are more prevalent than in the European nation.
"The studies were quite robust with a sample size above 5,000 and good psychometric properties," he said, per the New York Post, "however, the scale would need to be validated in North American samples in order to know how these attitudes manifest there. I encourage colleagues in the United States to study the prevalence of these attitudes in the country where they originate from."
