Problems of Ageing and Longevity · Sep 24, 2026
Age trajectories of emotional balance: the impact of war-related stress
By Pisaruk A
Objective — to extend a previously developed multicomponent mathematical model of Emotional Balance (EB) dynamics [1] to represent the impact of war-related chronic stress on age-related well-being trajectories from age 20 to 90. The extension introduces two independently manipulable perturbation channels within the existing EB architecture: a persistent shift in the balance of external positive and negative stimuli, and an acceleration of the biological aging-rate coefficient, motivated by the allostatic-load hypothesis linking chronic stress to accelerated biological decline. Two war-stress profiles — Mild war stress (stimulus and psychological perturbation only) and Severe war stress (stimulus/psychological perturbation plus accelerated biological aging) — were simulated against a peacetime baseline. Results and conclusions: 1. Mild war stress, modeled as a moderate reversal of the external stimulus balance together with reduced optimism and a contracted time horizon, produces an immediate Emotional Balance deficit of approximately 32–54% relative to peacetime baseline across the adult lifespan, fluctuating with age rather than following a fixed onset-and-decay pattern. 2. The retirement-related stimulus peak (~age 65) partially buffers this deficit in relative terms, reducing it to its minimum of approximately 32% at that age, since a fixed absolute stimulus boost represents a proportionally larger recovery against a depressed war-time baseline than against a peacetime one. 3. Severe war stress — combining a harsher stimulus/psychological profile with an accelerated biological aging rate consistent with the allostatic-load framework — produces a substantially larger deficit from early adulthood onward (~75% at age 20) that deepens further with age, reaching near-total collapse of Emotional Balance (>95%) by age 80 and effective extinction (99.5% deficit) by age 90. 4. The two war-stress profiles are distinguished not only by overall severity but by trajectory shape: Mild war stress produces a deficit that fluctuates within a moderate range across the lifespan, whereas Severe war stress produces a deficit that widens progressively after mid-life into near-total late-life collapse — offering a qualitative, in-principle testable criterion for distinguishing psychosocial-only from allostatic/biological mechanisms in longitudinal data. 5. The model provides a mechanistic, modular framework for generating age-differentiated, quantitative hypotheses about the psychological and biological cost of chronic collective trauma, applicable to the ongoing assessment of war-affected populations.