Do People Believe That They Get What They Deserve?

This article deals with the psychological outcomes of transformation and expectations concerning future returns in Georgia, Hungary, Poland, and Ukraine. The article aims to identify the groups that are adaptive enough to adjust to new conditions, and to portray the groups of population that either successfully survived the transformation or feel frustration concerning their own prospects for getting ahead. Five groups of respondents are defined. They had different attitudes concerning rewards and future expectations: the Ambitious, the Frustrated, the Optimists, the Marginalized, and the Confused. Using psychological characteristics their psychological portraits are described. Coherency was found between optimism, life satisfaction, and stress, on the one hand, and a new variable, which describes the psychological types of the respondents, on the other hand. About one-third of the population in Georgia, Poland, and Ukraine can be classified as the Frustrated. This frustration can be explained by a lack of social recognition. Income and education has low explanatory power in explaining the divisions among all five groups.