Author: Andrew Marshall

Founder & Editor of the BootCampMilitaryFitnessInstitute.com, MilitaryGogglebox.com, and Mental-Health-Matters.org.

What is Raison Oblige Theory?

Published on by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

Introduction

In psychology, certain seemingly-maladaptive human behaviours superficially appear to be attempts to confirm one’s own self views (i.e. self-esteem, self-concept, or self-knowledge), even when this self-view is negative or inaccurate. Raison oblige theory (ROT) instead explains these behaviours as consequences of a rational obligation to accept information only inasmuch as it concurs with one’s current self-views.

Developed by Aiden P. Gregg (2006), the theory seeks to supplant William Swann (1983)’s self-verification theory (SVT), which takes the observed behaviours at face value. Both theories provide viable accounts of observed evidence. However, what SVT identifies as confirmation-attempts, raison oblige theory instead considers attempts to accurately and honestly convey one’s self-views to others.

Empirical Phenomena

ROT analyses what is conventionally considered self-verifying behaviour: any action which ultimately coincides with and reinforces existing self-views. Thus a person with positive self-views attempts to seek positive information, which verifies their own positivity. Likewise, people with negative self-views, including those diagnosed with depression, show a preference for negative information.

The latter case has been observed in a wide variety of contexts, including (feigned) psychological studies, romantic partnerships, college roommates, and social groups. More generally, a preference for people who share one’s self view and avoidance of those who do not has been empirically replicated many times (e.g. Swann et al. 1992;Gregg 2007).

A number of conditions appear to influence the likelihood of engaging in self-verification: the importance (Swann & Pelham 2002), extremity, and certainty[10] of a self-view, as well as a perceived threat to identity (Swann et al., 2002), the intelligence of an evaluator, or the importance of the interactional partner (Swann, De La Ronde & Hixon 1994).

Origins

This collective evidence discussed above is often interpreted self-verificatory motive (e.g. Giesler et al., 1996). However, as Gregg (2007) pointed out, the evidence is hardly conclusive. Just because the actions appear to be self-confirmation does not mean that they are in fact motivated so. Similarly, self-defeating behaviour such as drug abuse does not certify a motive to self-defeat.

These philosophical difficulties are often explained away with the concept of affect: a person wants to act according to their best interests, but they also seek immediate relief from negative affect. Gregg (2007) argues that these epicycles make the theory unparsimonious.

Underlying Assumptions

Gregg (2007) argues that psychologists too often overlook rational cognition, when seeking to explain behaviours they observe. Given the traditional emphasis on self-enhancement, self-improvement and self-assessment motives, the naïve student might assume the effects of rationality small. But “rationality is pervasive and motives merely qualify it” (Gregg 2007).

In support, Gregg notes that, in the absence of rationality, we likely would not adhere to self-views at all. Instead, people would choose a self-view they liked, and behave accordingly. Grandiose delusions would dominate self-assessment, and analogous pathologies dominate self-enhancement and self-improvement.

But those behaviours are not observed. Instead, every healthy person is aware of reality and adheres to an unspoken set of rules of reason permitting them to act consistently with the physical world around them.

Consequently, Gregg argues that a psychologist’s first explanation for observed behaviour ought be some form of rational cognition. Until this supposition is shown false, and the only question left is to justify or interpret why the act is rational. Raison oblige theory extends this binding to self-view as well.

Hypothetical Situation

Consider the choice between interaction with person (A), who shares my self-views, and person (B), who does not. Empirical evidence suggests that I would opt for person A.

ROT explains this choice in terms of whether I can earnestly believe the information so gained to be a true representation of myself. Despite the desire for positive information to be true, I will ignore it if I cannot subjectively believe it.

Importantly, this “bubbling” behaviour does not demonstrate a motivational need to do so (Gregg 2007).

Common Pathological States

Self-Esteem

Self-esteem has a very strong influence on a person’s self-view. A person with high self-esteem is more likely to have a positive self-view, whereas a person with low self-esteem is more likely to have a negative self-view. Many studies that seemingly provide evidence for a self-verifying motive use self-esteem as an independent variable to demonstrate that people confirm a self-view that corresponds to their level of self-esteem.

However, one can argue that this behavioural evidence is circumstantial and that the correlation does not demonstrate motivation.

  • If a person with low self-esteem confirmed a self-view congruent to that of low self-esteem, it does not necessarily provide evidence for motivation to confirm a self-view.
  • ROT claims that people are aware of their self-views and believe them to be accurate. As a result, they answer questionnaires honestly, and report their self-views as they truly see them due to an obligation to reason.

People may not want self-verifying information to be true of them and may want others to view them positively rather than negatively.

Further research needs to be undertaken to fully investigate the relationship between self views and self-esteem. (see. Gregg, 2007)

  • Do people with low self-esteem want critical feedback to be true; are they motivated?
  • Do people with low self-esteem actually want their self view to be accurate, or would they prefer a more positive self view?

ROT predicts that people with low self-esteem are bound by reason to confirm their existing self view but that they do not necessarily like it (Gregg & De Waal-Andrews, 2007). If a motivation to self-verify were present then people with low self-esteem would not care about what their self-view was, they would instead focus on actively trying to confirm it.

Depression

Depression is accompanied by very low self-esteem and has therefore been a topic of strong interest for those investigating self verifying behaviours. Depression is always accompanied by low self-esteem but having low self-esteem does not necessarily mean you are depressed.

It argued that those suffering with depression, or with generally low negative self-views, will actively seek negative feedback in order to confirm their self-view; they find it more favourable. Giesler et al. (1996) tested this prediction by classifying participants into three separate groups; high self-esteem, low self-esteem and depressed individuals. When offered a choice of positive or negative feedback, depressed individuals chose to receive negative feedback 82% of the time, suggesting a strong desire to negatively re-affirm their self view. The seeking of negative feedback in order to self-verify has thus been argued to maintain a depressive state.

ROT challenges this interpretation and suggests that the observed behaviour and maintenance of depressive state is caused by an obligation to confirm a depressive self-concept. This particular study, and many others like it can be reinterpreted using ROT. The choice of negative feedback reflects the obligation to choose information consistent with an honestly held self view.

Correlations do not equal causation; The evidence for SVT assumptions of motivation drawn from studies on depression could be circumstantial and therefore do not provide explicit proof of a motive to self-verify.

Depression, Motivation and Desire

Motivation is interlinked with desire. I am hungry therefore I am motivated to eat food; I want to eat.

In SVT studies of depressed persons they are asked whether they would like to receive favourable or unfavourable feedback on their personality. In concurrence with SVT and ROT predictions they chose the unfavourable feedback due to a negative self-view. These studies demonstrate that self-enhancement striving has been overridden by a separate cognitive process.

If a person with high self-esteem confirms their self-view this may not be self-verification as this is more likely to be due to the self-enhancement motive. Therefore, SVT and ROT studies tend to focus on depressive participants who’s verification of negative information can not be attributed to self-enhancement.

  • However, Recent findings show that people with depression and high self-esteem both want to receive favourable feedback more than critical feedback.
  • This suggests that people do not want to receive feedback that confirms their self-view. A lack of desire implies that motivation is not responsible for self-verification.
  • Gregg & De Waal-Andrews (2007) also show that the lower a participant’s self-esteem, the less they anticipated liking critical feedback, and the less keen they were for it to be true, supporting ROT predictions.

Relationships

One example that is well explained by Raison Oblige Theory is why people stay in abusive relationships. According to Rusbult and Martz (1995) more than 40% of women who seek help from a shelter when being abused by their partner then return to living with their partner and remain in the abusive relationship.

Self-verification theory would explain this by the abused partner’s need to self-verify that the way they are being treated is deserved, in order to establish an accurate self-concept (Swann & Ely, 1984).

However the alternative explanation from Raison Oblige Theory is that an abused individual will rationalise the situation they are in and come to the conclusion that they themselves are in some way causing the abuse. This leads to the honest belief that they deserve the abuse and causes feelings of worthlessness. This results in the abused individual remaining loyal to their partner and failing to seek help, as they believe the abuse is their fault and that they need to improve in some way in order that the abuse will stop. Raison Oblige Theory also explains that the abused partner feels that they will gain no benefit from leaving an abusive relationship, as they see the abuse as their fault. This also explains why the abused individual may defend their partner should anyone outside the relationship become aware of the abuse.

Evidence

Motivation and Affect

Behaviour does not always reflect motivation:

  • We do things we do not want to do but are obliged to do (e.g. giving up leisure time to do work)
  • We voluntarily refrain from doing things that we want to do (e.g. making up qualifications to secure a job we want)

These examples demonstrate that behaviour does not always reflect motivation. However, they do demonstrate a cognitive overruling of desire/motive.

  • Motivation incurs negative affect when conditions are not met; I want to improve, I fail; I feel bad.
  • Striving to self verify should have an influence on affect.
  • A person with a negative self view should therefore be less disturbed by critical feedback than a person with high self-esteem.
  • Depressed:
    • Critical feedback negatively influences their self enhancing motive but bolsters their self verification motive.
  • High self-esteem:
    • Critical feedback negatively influences their self enhancing motive(ego) and their self verification motive.
  • High self-esteemed people should be more emotionally disturbed by critical feedback than depressed people. However, this is not the case (Jones, 1975; Taylor & Brown, 1988).

Obligation to Ratiocinate

  • Day to day examples of obligation to reason; Grandiose delusions are rare.
  • We accept new self views after a change in appearance or capabilities; we rationalise changes and challenges.
  • People are reasonable in thought, without reason grandiose delusions would have prevented the existence of our species; I can’t be killed; I can fight this mammoth alone; I can attack this man without consequence; I am the best person in the world.

The Effect of Rationality on Motivation

Self-assessment is bound to rational perception;

  • I believe what is subjectively possible.
  • Assessment is based on accurate perception, not subjective desire: Grandiose delusions are rare.

Self-enhancement is bound to rational perception;

  • The above-average effect is bound to the limits of subjective plausibility (Gregg, 2007).
  • specific compared traits succumb to the effect much less because people are aware of their ability compared to others. Commonly held traits can be exaggerated due to a larger latitude of comparison.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raison_oblige_theory >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

What is Identity Negotiation?

Published on by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

Introduction

Identity negotiation refers to the processes through which people reach agreements regarding “who is who” in their relationships.

Once these agreements are reached, people are expected to remain faithful to the identities they have agreed to assume. The process of identity negotiation thus establishes what people can expect of one another. Identity negotiation thus provides the interpersonal “glue” that holds relationships together.

The idea that identities are negotiated originated in the sociological literature during the middle of the 20th century. A leading figure in this movement was Goffman (1959, 1961), who asserted that the first order of business in social interaction is establishing a “working consensus” or agreement regarding the roles each person will assume in the interaction. Weinstein and Deutschberger (1964), and later McCall and Simmons (1966), built on this work by elaborating the interpersonal processes that unfold after interaction partners reach an initial working consensus. Within psychology, these ideas were elaborated by Secord and Backman (1965) and Schlenker (1985). The actual phrase “identity negotiation” was introduced by Swann (1987), who emphasized the tension between two competing processes in social interaction, behavioural confirmation and self-verification. Behavioural confirmation occurs when one person (the “perceiver”) encourages another person (the “target”) to behave in ways that confirm the expectancies of the perceiver (e.g. Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968; Snyder & Klein, 2005; Snyder, Tanke, & Berscheid, 1977). Self-verification occurs when the “target” persuades the “perceiver” to behave in a manner that verifies the target’s firmly held self-views or identities (Swann, 1983; 1996).

Psychological View

When the expectancies of perceivers clash with the self-views of targets, a “battle of wills” may occur (Swann & Ely, 1984). Such “battles” can range from short-lived, mild disagreements that are quickly and easily solved to highly pitched confrontations that are combative and contentious. On such occasions, the identity negotiation process represents the means through which these conflicting tendencies are reconciled.

More often than not, the identity negotiation process seems to favour self-verification, which means that people tend to develop expectancies that are congruent with the self-views of target persons (e.g. Major, Cozzarelli, Testa, & McFarlin, 1988); McNulty & Swann, 1994; Swann, Milton, & Polzer, 2000; Swann & Ely, 1984). Such congruence is personally adaptive for targets because it allows them to maintain stable identities and having stable identities is generally adaptive. That is, stable identities not only tell people how to behave, they also afford people with a sense of psychological coherence that reinforces their conviction that they know what to do and the consequences of doing it.

Groups also benefit when there is congruence among group members. When people maintain stable images of themselves, other members of the organisation can count on them to “be” the same person day in and day out and the identity negotiation process can unfold automatically. This may free people to devote their conscious attention to the work at hand, which may explain why researchers have found that groups characterised by high levels of congruence perform better (Swann et al., 2000). Also, just as demographic diversity tends to undermine group performance when congruence is low, diversity improves performance when congruence is high (Polzer, Milton, & Swann, 2003; Swann, Polzer, Seyle, & Ko, 2004).

Some instances of incongruence in relationships are inevitable. Sudden or unanticipated changes of status or role of one person, or even the introduction of a novel person into a group, may produce discrepancies between people’s self-views and the expectancies of others. In work settings, promotions can foment expectancy violations (cf, Burgoon, 1978) if some members of the organisation refuse to update their appraisals of the recently promoted person. When incongruence occurs, it will disturb the normal flow of social interaction. Instead of going about their routine tasks, interaction partners will be compelled to shift their conscious attention to the task of accommodating the identity change that is the source of the disruption. Frequent or difficult-to-resolve disruptions could be damaging to the quality of social interactions and ultimately interfere with relationship quality, satisfaction and productivity.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_negotiation >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

What is Self-Verification Theory?

Published on by Andrew Marshall1 Comment

Introduction

Self-verification is a social psychological theory that asserts people want to be known and understood by others according to their firmly held beliefs and feelings about themselves, that is self-views (including self-concepts and self-esteem). It is one of the motives that drive self-evaluation, along with self-enhancement and self-assessment.

Because chronic self-concepts and self-esteem play an important role in understanding the world, providing a sense of coherence, and guiding action, people become motivated to maintain them through self-verification. Such strivings provide stability to people’s lives, making their experiences more coherent, orderly, and comprehensible than they would be otherwise. Self-verification processes are also adaptive for groups, groups of diverse backgrounds, and the larger society, in that they make people predictable to one another thus serve to facilitate social interaction. To this end, people engage in a variety of activities that are designed to obtain self-verifying information.

Developed by William Swann (1981), the theory grew out of earlier writings which held that people form self-views so that they can understand and predict the responses of others and know how to act toward them.

Difference between Positive and Negative Self-Views

There are individual differences in people’s views of themselves. Among people with positive self-views, the desire for self-verification works together with another important motive, the desire for positive evaluations or “self enhancement”. For example, those who view themselves as “insightful” will find that their motives for both self-verification and self-enhancement encourage them to seek evidence that other people recognise their insightfulness.

In contrast, people with negative self-views will find that the desire for self-verification and self-enhancement are competing. Consider people who see themselves as disorganised. Whereas their desire for self-enhancement will compel them to seek evidence that others perceive them as organized, their desire for self-verification will compel such individuals to seek evidence that others perceive them as disorganised. Self-verification strivings tend to prevail over self-enhancement strivings when people are certain of the self-concept and when they have extremely depressive self-views.

Self-verification strivings may have undesirable consequences for people with negative self-views (depressed people and those who suffer from low self-esteem). For example, self-verification strivings may cause people with negative self-views to gravitate toward partners who mistreat them, undermine their feelings of self-worth, or even abuse them. And if people with negative self-views seek therapy, returning home to a self-verifying partner may undo the progress that was made there. Finally, in the workplace, the feelings of worthlessness that plague people with low self-esteem may foster feelings of ambivalence about receiving fair treatment, feelings that may undercut their propensity to insist that they get what they deserve from their employers (see: workplace bullying).

These findings and related ones point to the importance of efforts to improve the self-views of those who suffer from low self-esteem and depression.

Effects on Behaviour

In one series of studies, researchers asked participants with positive and negative self-views whether they would prefer to interact with evaluators who had favourable or unfavourable impressions of them. The results showed that those with positive self-views preferred favourable partners and those with negative self-views preferred unfavourable partners. The latter finding revealed that self-verification strivings may sometimes trump positivity strivings.

Self-verification motives operate for different dimensions of the self-concept and in many different situations. Men and women are equally inclined to display this tendency, and it does not matter whether the self-views refer to characteristics that are relatively immutable (e.g. intelligence) or changeable (e.g. diligence), or whether the self-views happen to be highly specific (e.g. athletic) or global (e.g. low self-esteem, worthlessness). Furthermore, when people chose negative partners over positive ones, it is not merely in an effort to avoid interacting with positive evaluators (that is, out of a concern that they might disappoint such positive evaluators). Rather, people chose self-verifying, negative partners even when the alternative is participating in a different experiment. Finally, recent work has shown that people work to verify self-views associated with group memberships. For example, women seek evaluations that confirm their belief that they possess qualities associated with being a woman.

Self-verification theory suggests that people may begin to shape others’ evaluations of them before they even begin interacting with them. They may, for example, display identity cues. The most effective identity cues enable people to signal who they are to potential interaction partners.

  • Physical appearance, such as clothes, body posture, demeanour. For example, the low self-esteem person who evokes reactions that confirm her negative self-views by slumping her shoulders and keeping her eyes fixed on the ground.
  • Other cues, such as the car someone buys, the house they live in, the way they decorate their living environment. For example, an SUV evokes reactions that confirm a person’s positive self-view.

Self-verification strivings may also influence the social contexts that people enter into and remain in. People reject those who provide social feedback that does not confirm their self-views, such as married people with negative self-views who reject spouses who see them positively and vice versa. College roommates behave in a similar manner. People are more inclined to divorce partners who perceived them too favourably. In each of these instances, people gravitated toward relationships that provided them with evaluations that confirmed their self-views and fled from those that did not.

When people fail to gain self-verifying reactions through the display of identity cue or through choosing self-verifying social environments, they may still acquire such evaluations by systematically evoking confirming reactions. For example, depressed people behave in negative ways toward their roommates, thus causing these roommates to reject them.

Self-verification theory predicts that when people interact with others, there is a general tendency for them to bring others to see them as they see themselves. This tendency is especially pronounced when they start out believing that the other person has misconstrued them, apparently because people compensate by working especially hard to bring others to confirm their self-views. People will even stop working on tasks to which they have been assigned if they sense that their performance is eliciting non-verifying feedback.

Role of Confirmation Bias

Self-verification theory predicts that people’s self-views will cause them to see the world as more supportive of these self-views than it really is. That is, individuals process information in a biased manner. These biases may be conscious and deliberate, but are probably more commonly done effortlessly and non-consciously. Through the creative use of these processes, people may dramatically increase their chances of attaining self-verification. There are at least three relevant aspects of information processing in self-verification:

  • Attention: People will attend to evaluations that are self-confirming while ignoring non-confirming evaluations.
  • Memory retrieval: self-views bias memory recall to favour self-confirming material over non-confirming elements.
  • Interpretation of information: people tend to interpret information in ways that reinforce their self-views.

These distinct forms of self-verification may often be implemented sequentially. For example, in one scenario, people may first strive to locate partners who verify one or more self-views. If this fails, they may redouble their efforts to elicit verification for the self-view in question or strive to elicit verification for a different self-view. Failing this, they may strive to “see” more self-verification than actually exists. And, if this strategy is also ineffective, they may withdraw from the relationship, either psychologically or in actuality.

Related Processes

Preference for Novelty

People seem to prefer modest levels of novelty; they want to experience phenomena that are unfamiliar enough to be interesting, but not so unfamiliar as to be frightening or too familiar as to be boring.

The implications of people’s preference for novelty for human relationships are not straightforward and obvious. Evidence that people desire novelty comes primarily from studies of people’s reactions to art objects and the like. This is different when it concerns human beings and social relationships because people can shift attention away from already familiar novel objects, while doing so in human relationships is difficult or not possible. But novel art objects are very different from people. If a piece of art becomes overly stimulating, we can simply shift our attention elsewhere. This is not a viable option should our spouse suddenly begin treating us as if we were someone else, for such treatment would pose serious questions about the integrity of people’s belief systems. Consequently, people probably balance competing desires for predictability and novelty by indulging the desire for novelty within contexts in which surprises are not threatening (e.g. leisure activities), while seeking coherence and predictability in contexts in which surprises could be costly—such as in the context of enduring relationships.

Tension with Self-Enhancement

People’s self-verification strivings are apt to be most influential when the relevant identities and behaviours matter to them. Thus, for example, the self-view should be firmly held, the relationship should be enduring, and the behaviour itself should be consequential. When these conditions are not met, people will be relatively unconcerned with preserving their self-views and they will instead indulge their desire for self-enhancement. In addition, self-reported emotional reactions favour self-enhancement while more thoughtful processes favour self-verification.

But if people with firmly held negative self-views seek self-verification, this does not mean that they are masochistic or have no desire to be loved. In fact, even people with very low self-esteem want to be loved. What sets people with negative self-views apart is their ambivalence about the evaluations they receive. Just as positive evaluations foster joy and warmth initially, these feelings are later chilled by incredulity. And although negative evaluations may foster sadness that the “truth” could not be kinder, it will at least reassure them that they know themselves. Happily, people with negative self-views are the exception rather than the rule. That is, on the balance, most people tend to view themselves positively. Although this imbalance is adaptive for society at large, it poses a challenge to researchers interested in studying self-verification. That is, for theorists interested in determining if behaviour is driven by self-verification or positivity strivings, participants with positive self-views will reveal nothing because both motives compel them to seek positive evaluations. If researchers want to learn if people prefer verification or positivity in a giving setting, they must study people with negative self-views.

Self-Concept Change

Although self-verification strivings tend to stabilize people’s self-views, changes in self-views may still occur. Probably the most common source of change is set in motion when the social environment recognises a significant change in a person’s age (e.g. when adolescents become adults), status (e.g. when students become teachers), or social role (e.g. when someone is convicted of a crime). Suddenly, the community may change the way that it treats the person. Eventually the target of such treatment will bring his or her self-view into accord with the new treatment.

Alternatively, people may themselves conclude that a given self-view is dysfunctional or obsolete and take steps to change it. Consider, for example, a woman who decides that her negative self-views have led her to tolerate abusive relationship partners. When she realizes that such partners are making her miserable, she may seek therapy. In the hands of a skilled therapist, she may develop more favourable self-views which, in turn, steer her toward more positive relationship partners with whom she may cultivate healthier relationships. Alternatively, when a woman who is uncertain about her negative self-concept enters a relationship with a partner who is certain that she deserves to view herself more positively, that woman will tend to improve the self-concept.

Criticism

Critics have argued that self-verification processes are relatively rare, manifesting themselves only among people with terribly negative self views. In support of this viewpoint, critics cite hundreds of studies indicating that people prefer, seek and value positive evaluations more than negative ones. Such sceptical assessments overlook three important points. First, because most people have relatively positive self-views, evidence of a preference for positive evaluations in unselected samples may in reality reflect a preference for evaluations that are self-verifying, because for such individuals self-verification and positivity strivings are indistinguishable. No number of studies of participants with positive self-views can determine whether self-verification or self-enhancement strivings are more common. Second, self-verification strivings are not limited to people with globally negative self-views; even people with high self-esteem seek negative evaluations about their flaws. Finally, even people with positive self-views appear to be uncomfortable with overly positive evaluations. For example, people with moderately positive self-views withdraw from spouses who evaluate them in an exceptionally positive manner.

Other critics have suggested that when people with negative self-views seek unfavourable evaluations, they do so as a means of avoiding truly negative evaluations or for purposes of self-improvement, with the idea being that this will enable them to obtain positive evaluations down the road. Tests of this idea have failed to support it. For example, just as people with negative self-views choose self-verifying, negative evaluators even when the alternative is being in another experiment, they choose to be in another experiment rather than interact with someone who evaluates them positively. Also, people with negative self-views are most intimate with spouses who evaluate them negatively, despite the fact that these spouses are relatively unlikely to enable them to improve themselves. Finally, in a study of people’s thought processes as they chose interaction partners, people with negative self-views indicated that they chose negative evaluators because such partners seemed likely to confirm their self-views (an epistemic consideration) and interact smoothly with them (a pragmatic consideration); self-improvement was rarely mentioned.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-verification_theory >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

What is Aversion to Happiness?

Published on by Andrew Marshall1 Comment

Introduction

Aversion to happiness, also called fear of happiness, is an attitude towards happiness in which individuals may deliberately avoid experiences that invoke positive emotions or happiness. Aversion to happiness is not a recognised mental health disorder on its own, but it can contribute to and/or exacerbate existing mental health issues.

Mohsen Joshanloo and Dan Weijers identify four reasons for an aversion to happiness:

  • A belief that happiness will cause bad things to happen
  • That happiness will cause you to become a bad person
  • That expressing happiness is somehow bad for you and others
  • That pursuing happiness is bad for you and others.

For example, “some people—in Western and Eastern cultures—are wary of happiness because they believe that bad things, such as unhappiness, suffering, and death, tend to happen to happy people.” Empirical studies show that fear of happiness is associated with fragility of happiness beliefs, suggesting that one of the causes of aversion to happiness may be the belief that happiness is unstable and fragile. Research shows that fear of happiness is associated with avoidant and anxious attachment styles. A study found that perfectionistic tendencies, loneliness, a childhood perceived as unhappy, belief in paranormal phenomena, and holding a collectivistic understanding of happiness are positively associated with aversion to happiness.

Cultural Factors

One of several reasons why fear of happiness may develop is the belief that when one becomes happy, a negative event will soon occur that will taint that happiness, as if punishing that individual for satisfaction. This belief is thought to be more prevalent in non-Western cultures. In Western cultures, such as American culture, “it is almost taken for granted that happiness is one of the most important values guiding people’s lives”. Western cultures are more driven by an urge to maximise happiness and to minimize sadness. Failing to appear happy often gives cause for concern. The value placed on happiness echoes through Western positive psychology and through research on subjective well-being.

These findings “call into question the notion that happiness is the ultimate goal, a belief echoed in any number of articles and self-help publications about whether certain choices are likely to make you happy”. Also, “in cultures that believe worldly happiness to be associated with sin, shallowness, and moral decline will actually feel less satisfied when their lives are (by other standards) going well”, so measures of personal happiness cannot simply be considered a yardstick for satisfaction with one’s life, and attitudes such as aversion to happiness have important implications for measuring happiness across cultures and ranking nations on happiness scores.

Aversion to happiness can be thought of as a specific example of ideal affect (described by affect valuation theory), whereby cultures vary in the extent to which they value the experience of different emotions.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aversion_to_happiness >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

What is Subjective Vitality?

Published on by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

Introduction

Subjective vitality refers to a positive feeling of aliveness and energy.

Outline

It is often used instead of measures of subjective well-being in studies of eudaimonia and psychological well-being.

It is also a better predictor of physical health when assessed by a doctor than subjective well-being.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_vitality >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

What is Role Suction?

Published on by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

Introduction

Role suction is a term introduced in the United States by Fritz Redl in the mid-20th century to describe the power of a social group to allocate roles to its members.

W.R. Bion’s group dynamics further explored the ways whereby the group (unconsciously) allocates particular functions to particular individuals in order to have its covert emotional needs met; and the process has recently been highlighted anew within the systems-centred therapy of Yvonne Agazarian.

Among regularly occurring group roles are those of the scapegoat for the group’s troubles; the joker; the peacemaker; the critic/spokesperson for group standards; the idol, or upholder of the group ideal; and the identified patient. In mixed gender groups, women may be disproportionately pressured by role suction into playing a nurturing/peacemaker role.

Driving Forces

The ease whereby people pick out those who play complementary games, and the psychological splitting of good and bad help fuel such role differentiation.

Behind role suction, such forces as projective identification and countertransference have been singled out as operating at an unconscious level in the group.

Role lock – confirming mutual suction into complementary roles, such as victim and abuser – is ensured by the intermeshing of projective identifications.

Wider Systems

The British anti-psychiatrists explored the theme of group suction in connection with role attribution in the family nexus, as well as with the allocations of roles in the wider social system, David Cooper suggesting that “there are always good or bad, loved or hated ‘mothers’ and ‘fathers’, older or younger ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’…in any institutional structure”.

A wider variety of roles can however be found in organisational life, the person-in-role acting as a container for the (unconscious) group forces.

Role of the Therapist

Bion has described his experience as a group therapist when he:

“feels he is being manipulated so as to be playing a part, no matter how difficult to recognize, in somebody else’s phantasy…a temporary loss of insight, a sense of experiencing strong feelings, and at the same time a belief that their existence is quite adequately justified by the objective situation”.

Bion’s work has also been used to illustrate the part played by role suction in the selection of group leaders – dependent groups favouring narcissistic leaders, the fight/flight group paranoids.

R.D. Laing considered that a central part of the therapist’s job was “not to allow himself to collude with the patients in adopting a position in their phantasy-system: and, alternatively, not to use the patients to embody any phantasy of their own” – to resist role suction. Later therapists however have explored how a measure of adaptation to patients’ role suction – a degree of role responsiveness – can be a useful element in the therapeutic use of the countertransference

Criticism

From the point of view of systems centred therapy, the debate relates to the interface between a personal system and the psycho-dynamics of social systems themselves.

Debate has arisen about how far the group imposes roles, and how far the individual’s own personality goes to meet the group halfway. Earl Hopper has used the term personification to challenge Redl’s concept, suggesting instead that group roles reflect the underlying personality of the individual involved. However, Kibel objects that in many cases the roles imposed are in fact ego-dystonic; with others pointing to how personal tendencies combine with group expectations with varying degrees of fit.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role_suction >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

What is the Clinician Administered PTSD Scale?

Published on by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

Introduction

The Clinically Administered PTSD Scale (CAPS) is an in-person clinical assessment for measuring posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The CAPS includes 30 items administered by a trained clinician to assess PTSD symptoms, including their frequency and severity. The CAPS distinguishes itself from other PTSD assessments in that it can also assess for current or past diagnoses of PTSD.

Background

The CAPS was originally designed by the National Centre for PTSD to assess PTSD. This measure was intended to be clinician-administered, and only administered by those clinicians with prior experience, training, and knowledge of PTSD. Previous measures of PTSD typically included introspective (subjective) self-report measures that the patient fills out without the help of a clinician. The clinically-administered PTSD scale was modelled after the Hamilton Depression Scale (HDRS), a clinician-administered scale to assess depressive features. The HDRS has been subject to criticism.

Some important features of the CAPS are:

  1. Allows for a range of symptom severity rather than a dichotomous (yes/no) result. This allows for both a diagnosis as well as a sliding scale for clinicians to assess relative changes. It can be used for weekly changes or for a one-time diagnosis.
  2. Creation of two scales: frequency and severity of symptoms. To fulfil a symptom criteria, a patient needs to have a certain frequency and severity of symptoms. This allows for a more refined level of measurement by measuring both how often a patient has symptoms and how severe they are.
  3. Uniformity – the assessment was created in a way that would promote uniform administration of the assessment through clear questions and probes for interviewers.

Evolution

Table 1 – Versions of the CAPS by Diagnostic Statistical Manual version

DSM-III-RDSM-IVDSM-5
Past MonthCAPS-1CAPS-DXCAPS-5
Past WeekCAPS-2CAPS-SXCAPS-5
Worst Month (Lifetime)CAPS-1CAPS-DXCAPS-5
ChildrenCAPS-CACAPS-CA-5

The CAPS has developed over the years to keep up with changes in the widely used Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and serves as a guide to clinicians in diagnosing mental disorders. It should be noted, however, that the DSM system of psychiatric classifications is problematic in typecasting many relatively normal behavioural issues as “abnormal” (e.g. such as the over-classification of ADHD), promoting and entrenching archaic stereotypical psychiatric nosology, and in reifying subjective suppositions about psychopathology. Detailed critiques of the DSM system of psychiatric classifications have been published.

Currently, there are three versions of the CAPS-5 (Table 1). One version provides responses in the past month, one provides responses in the past week, and the last provides responses for the worst month (lifetime PTSD). There is also a version for children – the CAPS-CA-5. Table 1 also shows the development of the CAPS by DSM version.

The CAPS1 was intended to monitor changes over a one-month period, whereas the CAPS-2 was developed to monitor changes over a week period. The CAPS-1 and CAPS-2 were later changed to the CAPS-DX and CAPS-SX respectively to avoid confusion over future versions. The CAPS-5 has two versions – one that can assess for one-week changes and one that can assess for one-month changes. The one-week changes may be more helpful for treatment providers to see change in symptom scores over time, whereas the one-month changes may be more helpful to assess for baseline PTSD.

The CAPS has been revised to the CAPS-5 to reflect current changes in the DSM-5. The CAPS is currently the gold-standard assessment for PTSD and is used widely through the VA for compensation and pension determinations. As outlined in Table 1, there are three versions of the CAPS, one to monitor monthly changes (often used for diagnosis), one to monitor weekly changes (often for assessing for time changes) and worst month (to assess for lifetime PTSD).

Current Version and Recent Changes

The current CAPS-5 contains 30 questions relating to PTSD symptoms. Each question asks about both the frequency and the severity of each symptom. These questions are split into categories. Each criterion has several questions, and scores for each criterion are added up at the end.

  • Criterion A: A traumatic event
  • Criterion B: Re-experiencing symptoms
  • Criterion C: Avoidance symptoms
  • Criterion D: Negative alterations in cognitions and mood
  • Criterion E: Alterations in arousal and reactivity
  • Criterion F: Disturbance lasted at least a month
  • Criterion G: Disturbance causing impairment

Scoring

To meet criteria for PTSD, a patient must have:

  • An index trauma/Criterion A event
  • At least one Criterion B symptom (questions 1-5)
  • At least one Criterion C symptom (questions 6-7)
  • At least two Criterion D symptoms (questions 8-14)
  • At least two Criterion E symptoms (questions 15-20)

Both criterion F and G must be met as well for a PTSD diagnosis. To meet criteria for a symptom, a patient must meet criteria in both frequency and intensity score for each item. Frequency and intensity and then combined to form a single severity score. Severity scores range from 0-4, with 0 being absent to 4 being extreme/incapacitating.

The National Centre for PTSD provides information for clinicians to learn how to administer and score the CAPS. They recommend that, in addition to training, the CAPS be administered by clinicians familiar with PTSD.

Sample Question and Clinician Follow-up

Sample Question: “In the past month, have you had any unwanted memories of (EVENT) while you were awake, so not counting dreams?”).

  • To calculate frequency, a patient may be asked “In the past month, have you had any unwanted memories of (EVENT) while you were awake, so not counting dreams?” or “How often have you had these memories in the past month?”
  • To calculate intensity, a patient may be asked “How much do these memories bother you” and “Are you able to put them out of your mind and think about something else.”

These frequency and intensity scores will get calculated together to create a severity score for each question. Total symptom severity is calculated by summing up all the individual item severity scores. For example, in the CAPS-IV scoring, to meet criteria for a symptom, the symptom must have an intensity score of 2 (on a scale or 0-4) or greater and a frequency score of 1 (on a scale of 0–4) or greater.

Psychometric Properties

Test-Retest Reliability

Although relatively high test-retest coefficients have been reported (Time 1 vs. Time 2), no information has been provided about the actual retest time interval. It is not possible to interpret test-retest reliability coefficients in the absence of knowing the retest time interval. Without provision of clear-cut information about the temporal stability of the CAPS-5 over varying intervals of time (e.g. 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 5 years, etc.), administration of the CAPS-5 cannot be recommended for assessment of PTSD in clinical populations.

Validity

The most recent version of the CAPS (CAPS-5) has demonstrated convergent validity with other measures of PTSD including the CAPS-IV and the PTSD Checklist. The CAPS-5 demonstrated discriminant validity with other measures, including measures of anxiety, substance abuse, and depression. It also has been translated into multiple languages, such as the Turkish and German that have also demonstrated validity.

Limitations

  • The CAPS can only assess for one trauma (one Criterion A event). This can present difficulties when a patient may have more than one trauma.
  • The CAPS can be a lengthy interview taking up to 45–60 minutes. It may be difficult to find the personnel and time to conduct these interviews for clinics that have fewer resources available.
  • The CAPS was constructed using data from military veterans. Although it is used in non-veteran populations, there may be differences in traumatology and symptoms between these populations.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinician_Administered_PTSD_Scale >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

What is Psychological Trauma?

Published on by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

Introduction

Psychological trauma (mental trauma, psychotrauma, or psychiatric trauma) is an emotional response caused by severe distressing events that are outside the normal range of human experiences, such as experiencing violence, rape, or a terrorist attack. The event must be understood by the affected person as directly threatening the affected person or their loved ones with death, severe bodily injury, or sexual violence; indirect exposure, such as from watching television news, may be extremely distressing and can produce an involuntary and possibly overwhelming physiological stress response, but does not produce trauma per se.

Short-term reactions such as psychological shock and psychological denial are typically followed. Long-term reactions and effects include bipolar disorder, uncontrollable flashbacks, panic attacks, insomnia, nightmare disorder, difficulties with interpersonal relationships, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Physical symptoms including migraines, hyperventilation, hyperhidrosis, and nausea are often developed.

As subjective experiences differ between individuals, people react to similar events differently. Most people who experience a potentially traumatic event do not become psychologically traumatised, though they may be distressed and experience suffering. Some will develop PTSD after exposure to a traumatic event, or series of events. This discrepancy in risk rate can be attributed to protective factors some individuals have, that enable them to cope with difficult events, including temperamental and environmental factors, such as resilience and willingness to seek help.

Psychotraumatology is the study of psychological trauma.

Signs and Symptoms

People who experience trauma often have problems and difficulties afterwards. The severity of these symptoms depends on the person, the types of trauma involved, and the support and treatment they receive from others. The range of reactions to trauma can be wide and varied, and differ in severity from person to person.

After a traumatic experience, a person may re-experience the trauma mentally and physically. For example, the sound of a motorcycle engine may cause intrusive thoughts or a sense of re-experiencing a traumatic experience that involved a similar sound e.g. gunfire. Sometimes a benign stimulus (e.g. noise from a motorcycle) may get connected in the mind with the traumatic experience. This process is called traumatic coupling. In this process, the benign stimulus becomes a trauma reminder, also called a trauma trigger. These can produce uncomfortable and even painful feelings. Re-experiencing can damage people’s sense of safety, self, self-efficacy, as well as their ability to regulate emotions and navigate relationships. They may turn to psychoactive drugs, including alcohol, to try to escape or dampen the feelings. These triggers cause flashbacks, which are dissociative experiences where the person feels as though the events are recurring. Flashbacks can range from distraction to complete dissociation or loss of awareness of the current context. Re-experiencing of symptoms is a sign that the body and mind are actively struggling to cope with the traumatic experience.

Triggers and cues act as reminders of the trauma and can cause anxiety and other associated emotions. Often the person can be completely unaware of what these triggers are. In many cases, this may lead a person with a traumatic disorder to engage in disruptive behaviours or self-destructive coping mechanisms, often without being fully aware of the nature or causes of their own actions. Panic attacks are an example of a psychosomatic response to such emotional triggers.

Consequently, intense feelings of anger may frequently surface, sometimes in inappropriate or unexpected situations, as danger may always seem to be present due to re-experiencing past events. Upsetting memories such as images, thoughts, or flashbacks may haunt the person, and nightmares may be frequent. Insomnia may occur as lurking fears and insecurity keep the person vigilant and on the lookout for danger, both day and night. A messy personal financial scene, as well as debt, are common features in trauma-affected people. Trauma does not only cause changes in one’s daily functions, but could also lead to morphological changes. Such epigenetic changes can be passed on to the next generation, thus making genetics one of the components of psychological trauma. However, some people are born with or later develop protective factors such as genetics that help lower their risk of psychological trauma.

The person may not remember what actually happened, while emotions experienced during the trauma may be re-experienced without the person understanding why (see Repressed memory). This can lead to the traumatic events being constantly experienced as if they were happening in the present, preventing the subject from gaining perspective on the experience. This can produce a pattern of prolonged periods of acute arousal punctuated by periods of physical and mental exhaustion. This can lead to mental health disorders like acute stress and anxiety disorder, prolonged grief disorder, somatic symptom disorder, conversion disorders, brief psychotic disorder, borderline personality disorder, adjustment disorder, etc. Obsessive-compulsive disorder is another mental health disorder with symptoms similar to that of psychological trauma, such as hyper-vigilance and intrusive thoughts. Research has indicated that individuals who have experienced a traumatic event have been known to use symptoms of obsessive- compulsive disorder, such as compulsive checking of safety, as a way to mitigate the symptoms associated with trauma.

In time, emotional exhaustion may set in, leading to distraction, and clear thinking may be difficult or impossible. Emotional detachment, as well as dissociation or “numbing out” can frequently occur. Dissociating from the painful emotion includes numbing all emotion, and the person may seem emotionally flat, preoccupied, distant, or cold. Dissociation includes depersonalisation disorder, dissociative amnesia, dissociative fugue, dissociative identity disorder, etc. Exposure to and re-experiencing trauma can cause neurophysiological changes like slowed myelination, abnormalities in synaptic pruning, shrinking of the hippocampus, cognitive and affective impairment. This is significant in brain scan studies done regarding higher-order function assessment with children and youth who were in vulnerable environments.

Some traumatized people may feel permanently damaged when trauma symptoms do not go away and they do not believe their situation will improve. This can lead to feelings of despair, transient paranoid ideation, loss of self-esteem, profound emptiness, suicidality, and frequently, depression. If important aspects of the person’s self and world understanding have been violated, the person may call their own identity into question. Often despite their best efforts, traumatized parents may have difficulty assisting their child with emotion regulation, attribution of meaning, and containment of post-traumatic fear in the wake of the child’s traumatisation, leading to adverse consequences for the child. In such instances, seeking counselling in appropriate mental health services is in the best interests of both the child and the parent(s).

Causes

Situational Trauma

Trauma can be caused by human-made, technological and natural disasters, including war, abuse, violence, vehicle collisions, or medical emergencies.

An individual’s response to psychological trauma can be varied based on the type of trauma, as well as socio-demographic and background factors.

There are several behavioural responses commonly used towards stressors including the proactive, reactive, and passive responses. Proactive responses include attempts to address and correct a stressor before it has a noticeable effect on lifestyle. Reactive responses occur after the stress and possible trauma has occurred and is aimed more at correcting or minimising the damage of a stressful event. A passive response is often characterized by an emotional numbness or ignorance of a stressor.

There is also a distinction between trauma induced by recent situations and long-term trauma which may have been buried in the unconscious from past situations such as child abuse. Trauma is sometimes overcome through healing; in some cases this can be achieved by recreating or revisiting the origin of the trauma under more psychologically safe circumstances, such as with a therapist. More recently, awareness of the consequences of climate change is seen as a source of trauma as individuals contemplate future events as well as experience climate change related disasters. Emotional experiences within these contexts are increasing, and collective processing and engagement with these emotions can lead to increased resilience and post-traumatic growth, as well as a greater sense of belongingness. These outcomes are protective against the devastating impacts of psychological trauma.

Stress Disorders

All psychological traumas originate from stress, a physiological response to an unpleasant stimulus. Long-term stress increases the risk of poor mental health and mental disorders, which can be attributed to secretion of glucocorticoids for a long period of time. Such prolonged exposure causes many physiological dysfunctions such as the suppression of the immune system and increase in blood pressure. Not only does it affect the body physiologically, but a morphological change in the hippocampus also takes place. Studies showed that extreme stress early in life can disrupt normal development of hippocampus and impact its functions in adulthood. Studies surely show a correlation between the size of hippocampus and one’s susceptibility to stress disorders. In times of war, psychological trauma has been known as shell shock or combat stress reaction. Psychological trauma may cause an acute stress reaction which may lead to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD emerged as the label for this condition after the Vietnam War in which many veterans returned to their respective countries demoralized, and sometimes, addicted to psychoactive substances.

The symptoms of PTSD must persist for at least one month for diagnosis to be made. The main symptoms of PTSD consist of four main categories: trauma (i.e. intense fear), reliving (i.e. flashbacks), avoidance behaviour (i.e. emotional numbing), and hypervigilance (i.e. continuous scanning of the environment for danger). Research shows that about 60% of the US population reported as having experienced at least one traumatic symptom in their lives, but only a small proportion actually develops PTSD. There is a correlation between the risk of PTSD and whether or not the act was inflicted deliberately by the offender. Psychological trauma is treated with therapy and, if indicated, psychotropic medications.

The term continuous posttraumatic stress disorder (CTSD) was introduced into the trauma literature by Gill Straker (1987). It was originally used by South African clinicians to describe the effects of exposure to frequent, high levels of violence usually associated with civil conflict and political repression. The term is also applicable to the effects of exposure to contexts in which gang violence and crime are endemic as well as to the effects of ongoing exposure to life threats in high-risk occupations such as police, fire, and emergency services.

As one of the processes of treatment, confrontation with their sources of trauma plays a crucial role. While debriefing people immediately after a critical incident has not been shown to reduce incidence of PTSD, coming alongside people experiencing trauma in a supportive way has become standard practice.

Moral Injury

Moral injury is distress such as guilt or shame following a moral transgression. There are many other definitions some based on different models of causality.  Moral injury is associated with post-traumatic stress disorder but is distinguished from it.  Moral injury is associated with guilt and shame while PTSD is correlated with fear and anxiety.

Vicarious Trauma

Normally, hearing about or seeing a recording of an event, even if distressing, does not cause trauma; however, an exception is made to the diagnostic criteria for work-related exposures. Vicarious trauma affects workers who witness their clients’ trauma. It is more likely to occur in situations where trauma related work is the norm rather than the exception. Listening with empathy to the clients generates feeling, and seeing oneself in clients’ trauma may compound the risk for developing trauma symptoms. Trauma may also result if workers witness situations that happen in the course of their work (e.g. violence in the workplace, reviewing violent video tapes.) Risk increases with exposure and with the absence of help-seeking protective factors and pre-preparation of preventive strategies. Individuals who have a personal history of trauma are also at increased risk for developing vicarious trauma. Vicarious trauma can lead workers to develop more negative views of themselves, others, and the world as a whole, which can compromise their quality of life and ability to work effectively

Theoretical Models

Shattered Assumptions Theory

Janoff-Bulman, theorises that people generally hold three fundamental assumptions about the world that are built and confirmed over years of experience: the world is benevolent, the world is meaningful, and I am worthy. According to the shattered assumption theory, there are some extreme events that “shatter” an individual’s worldviews by severely challenging and breaking assumptions about the world and ourself. Once one has experienced such trauma, it is necessary for an individual to create new assumptions or modify their old ones to recover from the traumatic experience. Therefore, the negative effects of the trauma are simply related to our worldviews, and if we repair these views, we will recover from the trauma.

In Psychodynamics

Psychodynamic viewpoints are controversial, but have been shown to have utility therapeutically.

French neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot, argued in the 1890s that psychological trauma was the origin of all instances of the mental illness known as hysteria. Charcot’s “traumatic hysteria” often manifested as paralysis that followed a physical trauma, typically years later after what Charcot described as a period of “incubation”. Sigmund Freud, Charcot’s student and the father of psychoanalysis, examined the concept of psychological trauma throughout his career. Jean Laplanche has given a general description of Freud’s understanding of trauma, which varied significantly over the course of Freud’s career: “An event in the subject’s life, defined by its intensity, by the subject’s incapacity to respond adequately to it and by the upheaval and long-lasting effects that it brings about in the psychical organization”.

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan claimed that what he called “The Real” had a traumatic quality external to symbolization. As an object of anxiety, Lacan maintained that The Real is “the essential object which isn’t an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence”.

Fred Alford, citing the work of object relations theorist Donald Winnicott, uses the concept of inner other, and internal representation of the social world, with which one converses internally and which is generated through interactions with others. He posits that the inner other is damaged by trauma but can be repaired by conversations with others such as therapists. He relates the concept of the inner other to the work of Albert Camus viewing the inner other as that which removes the absurd. Alford notes how trauma damages trust in social relations due to fear of exploitation and argues that culture and social relations can help people recover from trauma. 

Diana Fosha, a pioneer of modern psychodynamic perspective, also argues that social relations can help people recover from trauma, but specifically refers to attachment theory and the attachment dynamic of the therapeutic relationship. Fosha argues that the sense of emotional safety and co-regulation that occurs in a psychodynamically oriented therapeutic relationship acts as the secure attachment that is necessary to allow a client to experience and process through their trauma safely and effectively.

Diagnosis

As “trauma” adopted a more widely defined scope, traumatology as a field developed a more interdisciplinary approach. This is in part due to the field’s diverse professional representation including: psychologists, medical professionals, and lawyers. As a result, findings in this field are adapted for various applications, from individual psychiatric treatments to sociological large-scale trauma management. While the field has adopted a number of diverse methodological approaches, many pose their own limitations in practical application.

The experience and outcomes of psychological trauma can be assessed in a number of ways. Within the context of a clinical interview, the risk of imminent danger to the self or others is important to address but is not the focus of assessment. In most cases, it will not be necessary to involve contacting emergency services (e.g. medical, psychiatric, law enforcement) to ensure the individuals safety; members of the individual’s social support network are much more critical.

Understanding and accepting the psychological state of an individual is paramount. There are many misconceptions of what it means for a traumatized individual to be in psychological crisis. These are times when an individual is in inordinate amounts of pain and incapable of self-comfort. If treated humanely and respectfully the individual is less likely to resort to self harm. In these situations it is best to provide a supportive, caring environment and to communicate to the individual that no matter the circumstance, the individual will be taken seriously rather than being treated as delusional. It is vital for the assessor to understand that what is going on in the traumatised person’s head is valid and real. If deemed appropriate, the assessing clinician may proceed by inquiring about both the traumatic event and the outcomes experienced (e.g. post-traumatic symptoms, dissociation, substance abuse, somatic symptoms, psychotic reactions). Such inquiry occurs within the context of established rapport and is completed in an empathic, sensitive, and supportive manner. The clinician may also inquire about possible relational disturbance, such as alertness to interpersonal danger, abandonment issues, and the need for self-protection via interpersonal control. Through discussion of interpersonal relationships, the clinician is better able to assess the individual’s ability to enter and sustain a clinical relationship.

During assessment, individuals may exhibit activation responses in which reminders of the traumatic event trigger sudden feelings (e.g. distress, anxiety, anger), memories, or thoughts relating to the event. Because individuals may not yet be capable of managing this distress, it is necessary to determine how the event can be discussed in such a way that will not “retraumatise” the individual. It is also important to take note of such responses, as these responses may aid the clinician in determining the intensity and severity of possible post traumatic stress as well as the ease with which responses are triggered. Further, it is important to note the presence of possible avoidance responses. Avoidance responses may involve the absence of expected activation or emotional reactivity as well as the use of avoidance mechanisms (e.g. substance use, effortful avoidance of cues associated with the event, dissociation).

In addition to monitoring activation and avoidance responses, clinicians carefully observe the individual’s strengths or difficulties with affect regulation (i.e. affect tolerance and affect modulation). Such difficulties may be evidenced by mood swings, brief yet intense depressive episodes, or self-mutilation. The information gathered through observation of affect regulation will guide the clinician’s decisions regarding the individual’s readiness to partake in various therapeutic activities.

Though assessment of psychological trauma may be conducted in an unstructured manner, assessment may also involve the use of a structured interview. Such interviews might include the Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale, Acute Stress Disorder Interview, Structured Interview for Disorders of Extreme Stress, Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Dissociative Disorders – Revised, and Brief Interview for post-traumatic Disorders.

Lastly, assessment of psychological trauma might include the use of self-administered psychological tests. Individual scores on such tests are compared to normative data in order to determine how the individual’s level of functioning compares to others in a sample representative of the general population. Psychological testing might include the use of generic tests (e.g. MMPI-2, MCMI-III, SCL-90-R) to assess non-trauma-specific symptoms as well as difficulties related to personality. In addition, psychological testing might include the use of trauma-specific tests to assess post-traumatic outcomes. Such tests might include the post-traumatic Stress Diagnostic Scale, Davidson Trauma Scale, Detailed Assessment of post-traumatic Stress, Trauma Symptom Inventory, Trauma Symptom Checklist for Children, Traumatic Life Events Questionnaire, and Trauma-related Guilt Inventory.

Children are assessed through activities and therapeutic relationship, some of the activities are play genogram, sand worlds, colouring feelings, self and kinetic family drawing, symbol work, dramatic-puppet play, story telling, Briere’s TSCC, etc.

Definition

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) defines trauma as the symptoms that occur following exposure to an event (i.e., traumatic event) that involves actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence. This exposure could come in the form of experiencing the event or witnessing the event, or learning that an extreme violent or accidental event was experienced by a loved one. Trauma symptoms may come in the form of intrusive memories, dreams, or flashbacks; avoidance of reminders of the traumatic event; negative thoughts and feelings; or increased alertness or reactivity. Memories associated with trauma are typically explicit, coherent, and difficult to forget. Due to the complexity of the interaction between traumatic event occurrence and trauma symptomatology, a person’s distress response to aversive details of a traumatic event may involve intense fear or helplessness but ranges according to the context. In children, trauma symptoms can be manifested in the form of disorganised or agitative behaviours.

Trauma can be caused by a wide variety of events, but there are a few common aspects. There is frequently a violation of the person’s core assumptions about the world and their human rights, putting the person in a state of extreme confusion and insecurity. This is seen when institutions depended upon for survival violate, humiliate, betray, or cause major losses or separations instead of evoking aspects like positive self worth, safe boundaries and personal freedom.

Psychologically traumatic experiences often involve physical trauma that threatens one’s survival and sense of security. Typical causes and dangers of psychological trauma include harassment, embarrassment, abandonment, abusive relationships, rejection, co-dependence, physical assault, sexual abuse, partner battery, employment discrimination, police brutality, judicial corruption and misconduct, bullying, paternalism, domestic violence, indoctrination, being the victim of an alcoholic parent, the threat or the witnessing of violence (particularly in childhood), life-threatening medical conditions, and medication-induced trauma. Catastrophic natural disasters such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, large scale transportation accidents, house or domestic fire, motor collision, mass interpersonal violence like war, terrorist attacks or other mass victimisation like sex trafficking, being taken as a hostage or being kidnapped can also cause psychological trauma. Long-term exposure to situations such as extreme poverty or other forms of abuse, such as verbal abuse, exist independently of physical trauma but still generate psychological trauma.

Some theories suggest childhood trauma can increase one’s risk for mental disorders including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and substance abuse. Childhood adversity is associated with neuroticism during adulthood. Parts of the brain in a growing child are developing in a sequential and hierarchical order, from least complex to most complex. The brain’s neurons change in response to the constant external signals and stimulation, receiving and storing new information. This allows the brain to continually respond to its surroundings and promote survival. The five traditional signals (sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch) contribute to the developing brain structure and its function. Infants and children begin to create internal representations of their external environment, and in particular, key attachment relationships, shortly after birth. Violent and victimising attachment figures impact infants’ and young children’s internal representations. The more frequently a specific pattern of brain neurons is activated, the more permanent the internal representation associated with the pattern becomes. This causes sensitization in the brain towards the specific neural network. Because of this sensitization, the neural pattern can be activated by decreasingly less external stimuli. Child abuse tends to have the most complications, with long-term effects out of all forms of trauma, because it occurs during the most sensitive and critical stages of psychological development. It could lead to violent behaviour, possibly as extreme as serial murder. For example, Hickey’s Trauma-Control Model suggests that “childhood trauma for serial murderers may serve as a triggering mechanism resulting in an individual’s inability to cope with the stress of certain events.”

Often, psychological aspects of trauma are overlooked even by health professionals: “If clinicians fail to look through a trauma lens and to conceptualize client problems as related possibly to current or past trauma, they may fail to see that trauma victims, young and old, organize much of their lives around repetitive patterns of reliving and warding off traumatic memories, reminders, and affects.” Biopsychosocial models offer a broader view of health problems than biomedical models.

Effects

Evidence suggests that a minority of people who experience severe trauma in adulthood will experience enduring personality change. Personality changes include guilt, distrust, impulsiveness, aggression, avoidance, obsessive behaviour, emotional numbness, loss of interest, hopelessness and altered self-perception.

Treatment

A number of psychotherapy approaches have been designed with the treatment of trauma in mind—EMDR, progressive counting, somatic experiencing, biofeedback, Internal Family Systems Therapy, and sensorimotor psychotherapy, and Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) etc. Trauma informed care provides a framework for any person in any discipline or context to promote healing, or at least not re-traumatizing.

There is a large body of empirical support for the use of cognitive behavioural therapy for the treatment of trauma-related symptoms, including post-traumatic stress disorder. Institute of Medicine guidelines identify cognitive behavioural therapies as the most effective treatments for PTSD. Two of these cognitive behavioural therapies, prolonged exposure and cognitive processing therapy, are being disseminated nationally by the Department of Veterans Affairs for the treatment of PTSD. A 2010 Cochrane review found that trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy was effective for individuals with acute traumatic stress symptoms when compared to waiting list and supportive counselling. Seeking Safety is another type of cognitive behavioural therapy that focuses on learning safe coping skills for co-occurring PTSD and substance use problems. While some sources highlight Seeking Safety as effective with strong research support, others have suggested that it did not lead to improvements beyond usual treatment. Recent studies show that a combination of treatments involving dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT), often used for borderline personality disorder, and exposure therapy is highly effective in treating psychological trauma. If, however, psychological trauma has caused dissociative disorders or complex PTSD, the trauma model approach (also known as phase-oriented treatment of structural dissociation) has been proven to work better than the simple cognitive approach. Studies funded by pharmaceuticals have also shown that medications such as the new antidepressants are effective when used in combination with other psychological approaches. At present, the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants sertraline (Zoloft) and paroxetine (Paxil) are the only medications that have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States to treat PTSD. Other options for pharmacotherapy include serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor (SNRI) antidepressants and antipsychotic medications, though none have been FDA approved.

Trauma therapy allows processing trauma-related memories and allows growth towards more adaptive psychological functioning. It helps to develop positive coping instead of negative coping and allows the individual to integrate upsetting-distressing material (thoughts, feelings and memories) and to resolve these internally. It also aids in the growth of personal skills like resilience, ego regulation, empathy, etc.

Processes involved in trauma therapy are:

  • Psychoeducation: Information dissemination and educating in vulnerabilities and adoptable coping mechanisms.
  • Emotional regulation: Identifying, countering discriminating, grounding thoughts and emotions from internal construction to an external representation.
  • Cognitive processing: Transforming negative perceptions and beliefs about self, others and environment to positive ones through cognitive reconsideration or re-framing.
  • Trauma processing: Systematic desensitization, response activation and counter-conditioning, titrated extinction of emotional response, deconstructing disparity (emotional vs. reality state), resolution of traumatic material (in theory, to a state in which triggers no longer produce harmful distress and the individual is able to express relief.)
  • Emotional processing: Reconstructing perceptions, beliefs and erroneous expectations, habituating new life contexts for auto-activated trauma-related fears, and providing crisis cards with coded emotions and appropriate cognition. (This stage is only initiated in pre-termination phase from clinical assessment and judgement of the mental health professional.)
  • Experiential processing: Visualisation of achieved relief state and relaxation methods.

A number of complementary approaches to trauma treatment have been implicated as well, including yoga and meditation. There has been recent interest in developing trauma-sensitive yoga practices, but the actual efficacy of yoga in reducing the effects of trauma needs more exploration.

In health and social care settings, a trauma informed approach means that care is underpinned by understandings of trauma and its far-reaching implications. Trauma is widespread. For example, 26% of participants in the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) study were survivors of one ACE and 12.5% were survivors of four or more ACEs. A trauma-informed approach acknowledges the high rates of trauma and means that care providers treat every person as if they might be a survivor of trauma. Measurement of the effectiveness of a universal trauma informed approach is in early stages and is largely based in theory and epidemiology.

Trauma informed teaching practice is an educative approach for migrant children from war-torn countries, who have typically experienced complex trauma, and the number of such children entering Canadian schools has led some school jurisdictions to consider new classroom approaches to assist these pupils. Along with complex trauma, these students often have experienced interrupted schooling due to the migration process, and as a consequence may have limited literacy skills in their first language. One study of a Canadian secondary school classroom, as told through journal entries of a student teacher, showed how Blaustein and Kinniburgh’s ARC (attachment, regulation and competency) framework was used to support newly arrived refugee students from war zones. Tweedie et al. (2017) describe how key components of the ARC framework, such as establishing consistency in classroom routines; assisting students to identify and self-regulate emotional responses; and enabling student personal goal achievement, are practically applied in one classroom where students have experienced complex trauma. The authors encourage teachers and schools to avoid a deficit lens to view such pupils, and suggest ways schools can structure teaching and learning environments which take into account the extreme stresses these students have encountered.

Society and Culture

Some people, and many self-help books, use the word trauma broadly, to refer to any unpleasant experience, even if the affected person has a psychologically healthy response to the experience. This imprecise language may promote the medicalisation of normal human behaviours (e.g. grief after a death) and make discussions of psychological trauma more complex, but it might also encourage people to respond with compassion to the distress and suffering of others.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_trauma >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

What is Psychological Resilience?

Published on by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

Introduction

Psychological resilience is the ability to cope mentally and emotionally with a crisis, or to return to pre-crisis status quickly.

The term was popularised in the 1970s and 1980s by psychologist Emmy Werner as she conducted a forty-year-long study of a cohort of Hawaiian children who came from low socioeconomic status backgrounds.

Numerous factors influence a person’s level of resilience. Internal factors include personal characteristics such as self-esteem, self-regulation, and a positive outlook on life. External factors include social support systems, including relationships with family, friends, and community, as well as access to resources and opportunities.

People can leverage psychological interventions and other strategies to enhance their resilience and better cope with adversity. These include cognitive-behavioural techniques, mindfulness practices, building psychosocial factors, fostering positive emotions, and promoting self-compassion.

Brief History

The first research on resilience was published in 1973. The study used epidemiology—the study of disease prevalence—to uncover the risks and the protective factors that now help define resilience. A year later, the same group of researchers created tools to look at systems that support development of resilience.

Emmy Werner was one of the early scientists to use the term resilience. She studied a cohort of children from Kauai, Hawaii. Kauai was quite poor and many of the children in the study grew up with alcoholic or mentally ill parents. Many of the parents were also out of work. Werner noted that of the children who grew up in these detrimental situations, two-thirds exhibited destructive behaviours in their later-teen years, such as chronic unemployment, substance abuse, and out-of-wedlock births (in girls). However, one-third of these youngsters did not exhibit destructive behaviours. Werner called the latter group resilient. Thus, resilient children and their families were those who, by definition, demonstrated traits that allowed them to be more successful than non-resilient children and families.

Resilience also emerged as a major theoretical and research topic in the 1980s in studies of children with mothers diagnosed with schizophrenia. A 1989 study showed that children with a schizophrenic parent may not obtain an appropriate level of comforting caregiving—compared to children with healthy parents—and that such situations often had a detrimental impact on children’s development. On the other hand, some children of ill parents thrived and were competent in academic achievement, which led researchers to make efforts to understand such responses to adversity.

Since the onset of the research on resilience, researchers have been devoted to discovering protective factors that explain people’s adaptation to adverse conditions, such as maltreatment, catastrophic life events, or urban poverty. Researchers endeavour to uncover how some factors (e.g. connection to family) may contribute to positive outcomes.

Overview

A resilient person uses “mental processes and behaviours in promoting personal assets and protecting self from the potential negative effects of stressors”. Psychological resilience is an adaptation in a person’s psychological traits and experiences that allows them to regain or remain in a healthy mental state during crises/chaos without long-term negative consequences.

It is difficult to measure and test this psychological construct because resilience can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Most psychological paradigms (biomedical, cognitive-behavioural, sociocultural, etc.) have their own perspective of what resilience looks like, where it comes from, and how it can be developed. There are numerous definitions of psychological resilience, most of which centre around two concepts: adversity and positive adaptation. Positive emotions, social support, and hardiness can influence a person to become more resilient.

A psychologically resilient person can resist adverse mental conditions that are often associated with unfavourable life circumstances. This differs from psychological recovery which is associated with returning to those mental conditions that preceded a traumatic experience or personal loss.

Research on psychological resilience has shown that it plays a crucial role in promoting mental health and well-being. Resilient people are better equipped to navigate life’s challenges, maintain positive emotions, and recover from setbacks. They demonstrate higher levels of self-efficacy, optimism, and problem-solving skills, which contribute to their ability to adapt and thrive in adverse situations.

Resilience is a “positive adaptation” after a stressful or adverse situation. When a person is “bombarded by daily stress, it disrupts their internal and external sense of balance, presenting challenges as well as opportunities.” The routine stressors of daily life can have positive impacts which promote resilience. Some psychologists believe that it is not stress itself that promotes resilience but rather the person’s perception of their stress and of their level of control. The presence of stress allows people to practice resilience. It is unknown what the correct level of stress is for each person. Some people can handle more stress than others.

Stress is experienced in a person’s life course at times of difficult life transitions, involving developmental and social change; traumatic life events, including grief and loss; and environmental pressures, encompassing poverty and community violence.

Resilience is the integrated adaptation of physical, mental, and spiritual aspects to circumstances, and a coherent sense of self that is able to maintain normative developmental tasks that occur at various stages of life. The Children’s Institute of the University of Rochester explains that “resilience research is focused on studying those who engage in life with hope and humor despite devastating losses”.

Resilience is not only about overcoming a deeply stressful situation, but also coming out of such a situation with “competent functioning”. Resiliency allows a person to rebound from adversity as a strengthened and more resourceful person.

Some characteristics associated with psychological resilience include: an easy temperament, good self-esteem, planning skills, and a supportive environment inside and outside of the family.

When an event is appraised as comprehensible (predictable), manageable (controllable), and somehow meaningful (explainable) a resilient response is more likely.

Process

Psychological resilience is commonly understood as a process. It can also be characterized as a tool a person develops over time, or as a personal trait of the person (“resiliency”). Most research shows resilience as the result of people being able to interact with their environments and participate in processes that either promote well-being or protect them against the overwhelming influence of relative risk. This research supports the model in which psychological resilience is seen as a process rather than a trait—something to develop or pursue, rather than a static endowment or endpoint.

Ray Williams believes that there are three basic ways people may react when faced with a difficult situation.

  • Respond with anger or aggression
  • Become overwhelmed and shut down
  • Feel the emotion about the situation and appropriately handle the emotion

He believes the third option helps a person promote wellness and demonstrate resilience. People who take the first or second options tend to label themselves as victims of circumstance or blame others for their misfortune. They do not effectively cope with their environment but become reactive, and they tend to cling to negative emotions. This often makes it difficult to focus on problem solving or to recover. Those who are more resilient respond to their conditions by coping, bouncing back, and looking for a solution. Williams believes that resilience can be aided by supportive social environments (such as families, communities, schools) and social policies.

Resilience can be viewed as a developmental process (the process of developing resilience), or as indicated by a response process. In the latter approach, the effects of an event or stressor on a situationally relevant indicator variable are studied, distinguishing immediate responses, dynamic responses, and recovery patterns. In response to a stressor, more-resilient people show some (but less than less-resilient people) increase in stress. The speed with which this stress response returns to pre-stressor levels is also indicative of a person’s resilience.

Biological Models

“Resilience, conceptualized as a positive bio-psychological adaptation, has proven to be a useful theoretical context for understanding variables for predicting long-term health and well-being”.

Three notable bases for resilience—self-confidence, self-esteem and self-concept – each have roots in a different nervous system—respectively, the somatic nervous system, the autonomic nervous system, and the central nervous system.

Research indicates that, like trauma, resilience is influenced by epigenetic modifications. Increased DNA methylation of the growth factor GDNF in certain brain regions promotes stress resilience, as do molecular adaptations of the blood–brain barrier.

The two neurotransmitters primarily responsible for stress buffering within the brain are dopamine and endogenous opioids, as evidenced by research showing that dopamine and opioid antagonists increased stress response in both humans and animals. Primary and secondary rewards reduce negative reactivity of stress in the brain in both humans and animals. The relationship between social support and stress resilience is thought to be mediated by the oxytocin system’s impact on the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.

Trait Resilience

Temperamental and constitutional disposition is a major factor in resilience. It is one of the necessary precursors of resilience along with warmth in family cohesion and accessibility of prosocial support systems. There are three kinds of temperamental systems that play part in resilience: the appetitive system, defensive system, and attentional system.

Trait resilience is negatively correlated with the personality traits of neuroticism and negative emotionality, which represent tendencies to see and react to the world as threatening, problematic, and distressing, and to view oneself as vulnerable. Trait resilience is positively correlated with the personality traits of openness and positive emotionality, that represent tendencies to engage with and confront the world with confidence in success and a fair value to self-directedness.

Resilience traits are personal characteristics that express how people approach and react to events that they experience as negative. Trait resilience is generally considered via two methods: direct assessment of traits through resilience measures and proxy assessments of resilience in which existing cognate psychological constructs are used to explain resilient outcomes. Typically, trait resilience measures explore how individuals tend to react to and cope with adverse events. Proxy assessments of resilience, sometimes referred to as the buffering approach, view resilience as the antithesis of risk, focusing on how psychological processes interrelate with negative events to mitigate their effects. Possibly an individual perseverance trait, conceptually related to persistence and resilience, could also be measured behaviourally by means of arduous, difficult, or otherwise unpleasant tasks.

Developing and Sustaining Resilience

There are several theories or models that attempt to describe subcomponents, prerequisites, predictors, or correlates of resilience.

Fletcher and Sarkar found five factors that develop and sustain a person’s resilience:

  • The ability to make realistic plans and being capable of taking the steps necessary to follow through with them
  • Confidence in one’s strengths and abilities
  • Communication and problem-solving skills
  • The ability to manage strong impulses and feelings
  • having good self-esteem

Among older adults, Kamalpour et al. found that the important factors are external connections, grit, independence, self-care, self-acceptance, altruism, hardship experience, health status, and positive perspective on life.

Another study examined thirteen high-achieving professionals who seek challenging situations that require resilience, all of whom had experienced challenges in the workplace and negative life events over the course of their careers but who had also been recognised for their great achievements in their respective fields. Participants were interviewed about everyday life in the workplace as well as their experiences with resilience and thriving. The study found six main predictors of resilience: positive and proactive personality, experience and learning, sense of control, flexibility and adaptability, balance and perspective, and perceived social support. High achievers were also found to engage in many activities unrelated to their work such as engaging in hobbies, exercising, and organising meetups with friends and loved ones.

The American Psychological Association, in its popular psychology-oriented Psychology topics publication, suggests the following tactics people can use to build resilience:

  • Prioritise relationships.
  • Join a social group.
  • Take care of your body.
  • Practice mindfulness.
  • Avoid negative coping outlets (like alcohol use).
  • Help others.
  • Be proactive; search for solutions.
  • Make progress toward your goals.
  • Look for opportunities for self-discovery.
  • Keep things in perspective.
  • Accept change.
  • Maintain a hopeful outlook.
  • Learn from your past.

The idea that one can build one’s resilience implies that resilience is a developable characteristic, and so is perhaps at odds with the theory that resilience is a process.

Positive Emotions

The relationship between positive emotions and resilience has been extensively studied. People who maintain positive emotions while they face adversity are more flexible in their thinking and problem solving. Positive emotions also help people recover from stressful experiences. People who maintain positive emotions are better-defended from the physiological effects of negative emotions, and are better-equipped to cope adaptively, to build enduring social resources, and to enhance their well-being.

The ability to consciously monitor the factors that influence one’s mood is correlated with a positive emotional state. This is not to say that positive emotions are merely a by-product of resilience, but rather that feeling positive emotions during stressful experiences may have adaptive benefits in the coping process. Resilient people who have a propensity for coping strategies that concretely elicit positive emotions—such as benefit-finding and cognitive reappraisal, humour, optimism, and goal-directed problem-focused coping—may strengthen their resistance to stress by allocating more access to these positive emotional resources. Social support from caring adults encouraged resilience among participants by providing them with access to conventional activities.

Positive emotions have physiological consequences. For example, humour leads to improvements in immune system functioning and increases in levels of salivary immunoglobulin A, a vital system antibody, which serves as the body’s first line of defence in respiratory illnesses. Other health outcomes include faster injury recovery rate and lower readmission rates to hospitals for the elderly, and reductions in the length of hospital stay. One study has found early indications that older adults who have increased levels of psychological resilience have decreased odds of death or inability to walk after recovering from hip fracture surgery. In another study, trait-resilient individuals experiencing positive emotions more quickly rebounded from cardiovascular activation that was initially generated by negative emotional arousal.

Social Support

Social support is an important factor in the development of resilience. While many competing definitions of social support exist, they tend to concern one’s degree of access to, and use of, strong ties to other people who are similar to oneself. Social support requires solidarity and trust, intimate communication, and mutual obligation both within and outside the family.

Military studies have found that resilience is also dependent on group support: unit cohesion and morale is the best predictor of combat resiliency within a unit or organisation. Resilience is highly correlated with peer support and group cohesion. Units with high cohesion tend to experience a lower rate of psychological breakdowns than units with low cohesion and morale. High cohesion and morale enhance adaptive stress reactions. War veterans who had more social support were less likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

A number of self-help approaches to resilience-building have been developed, drawing mainly on cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and rational emotive behaviour therapy (REBT). For example, a group cognitive-behavioural intervention, called the Penn Resiliency Programme (PRP), fosters aspects of resilience. A meta-analysis of 17 PRP studies showed that the intervention significantly reduces depressive symptoms over time.

In CBT, building resilience is a matter of mindfully changing behaviours and thought patterns. The first step is to change the nature of self-talk—the internal monologue people have that reinforces beliefs about their self-efficacy and self-value. To build resilience, a person needs to replace negative self-talk, such as “I can’t do this” and “I can’t handle this”, with positive self-talk. This helps to reduce psychological stress when a person faces a difficult challenge. The second step is to prepare for challenges, crises, and emergencies. Businesses prepare by creating emergency response plans, business continuity plans, and contingency plans. Similarly, an individual can create a financial cushion to help with economic stressors, maintain supportive social networks, and develop emergency response plans.

Language Learning and Communication

Language learning and communication help develop resilience in people who travel, study abroad, work internationally, or in those who find themselves as refugees in countries where their home language is not spoken.

Research conducted by the British Council found a strong relationship between language and resilience in refugees. Providing adequate English-learning programmes and support for Syrian refugees builds resilience not only in the individual, but also in the host community. Language builds resilience in five ways:

  • Home language and literacy development: Development of home language and literacy helps create the foundation for a shared identity. By maintaining the home language, even when displaced, a person not only learns better in school, but enhances their ability to learn other languages. This improves resilience by providing a shared culture and sense of identity that allows refugees to maintain close relationships to others who share their identity and sets them up to possibly return one day.
  • Access to education, training, and employment: This allows refugees to establish themselves in their host country and provides more ease when attempting to access information, apply to work or school, or obtain professional documentation. Securing access to education or employment is largely dependent on language competency, and both education and employment provide security and success that enhance resilience and confidence.
  • Learning together and social cohesion: Learning together encourages resilience through social cohesion and networks. When refugees engage in language-learning activities with host communities, engagement and communication increases. Both refugee and host community are more likely to celebrate diversity, share their stories, build relationships, engage in the community, and provide each other with support. This creates a sense of belonging with the host communities alongside the sense of belonging established with other members of the refugee community through home language.
  • Addressing the effects of trauma on learning: Additionally, language programs and language learning can help address the effects of trauma by providing a means to discuss and understand. Refugees are more capable of expressing their trauma, including the effects of loss, when they can effectively communicate with their host community. Especially in schools, language learning establishes safe spaces through storytelling, which further reinforces comfort with a new language, and can in turn lead to increased resilience.
  • Building inclusivity: This is more focused on providing resources. By providing institutions or schools with more language-based learning and cultural material, the host community can learn how to better address the needs of the refugee community. This feeds back into the increased resilience of refugees by creating a sense of belonging and community.

Another study shows the impacts of storytelling in building resilience. It aligns with many of the five factors identified by the study completed by the British Council, as it emphasizes the importance of sharing traumatic experiences through language. It showed that those who were exposed to more stories, from family or friends, had a more holistic view of life’s struggles, and were thus more resilient, especially when surrounded by foreign languages or attempting to learn a new language.

Development Programmes

The Head Start programme promotes resilience, as does the Big Brothers Big Sisters Programme, Centred Coaching & Consulting, the Abecedarian Early Intervention Project, and social programmes for youth with emotional or behavioural difficulties.

The Positive Behaviour Supports and Intervention programme is a trauma-informed, resilience-based program for elementary age students. It has four components:

  • Positive reinforcements such as encouraging feedback;
  • Understanding that behaviour is a response to unmet needs or a survival response;
  • Promoting belonging, mastery, and independence; and
  • Creating an environment to support the student through sensory tools, mental health breaks, and play.

Tuesday’s Children, a family service organisation that made a long-term commitment to people who lost loved ones to 9/11 and terrorism around the world, works to build psychological resilience through programmes such as Mentoring and Project Common Bond, an eight-day peace-building and leadership initiative for people aged 15–20, from around the world, who have been directly impacted by terrorism.

Military organisations test personnel for the ability to function under stressful circumstances by deliberately subjecting them to stress during training. Those students who do not exhibit the necessary resilience can be screened out of the training. Those who remain can be given stress inoculation training. The process is repeated as personnel apply for increasingly demanding positions, such as special forces.

Other Factors

Another protective factor is related to moderating the negative effects of environmental hazards or a stressful situation in order to direct vulnerable individuals to optimistic paths, such as external social support. One study distinguished three contexts for protective factors:

  • Personal attributes, including outgoing, bright, and positive self-concepts
  • The family, such as having close bonds with at least one family member or an emotionally stable parent
  • The community, such as receiving support or counsel from peers

A study of the elderly in Zurich, Switzerland, illuminated the role humour plays to help people remain happy in the face of age-related adversity.

Research has also been conducted into individual differences in resilience. Self-esteem, ego-control, and ego-resiliency are related to behavioural adaptation. Maltreated children who feel good about themselves may process risk situations differently by attributing different reasons to the environments they experience and, thereby, avoiding negative internalised self-perceptions. Ego-control is “the threshold or operating characteristics of an individual with regard to the expression or containment”  of their impulses, feelings, and desires. Ego-resilience refers to the “dynamic capacity, to modify his or her model level of ego-control, in either direction, as a function of the demand characteristics of the environmental context” 

Demographic information (e.g. gender) and resources (e.g. social support) also predict resilience. After disaster women tend to show less resilience than men, and people who were less involved in affinity groups and organisations also showed less resilience.

Certain aspects of religions, spirituality, or mindfulness could promote or hinder certain psychological virtues that increase resilience. However, as of 2009 the “there has not yet been much direct empirical research looking specifically at the association of religion and ordinary strengths and virtues”. In a review of the literature on the relationship between religiosity/spirituality and PTSD, about half of the studies showed a positive relationship and half showed a negative relationship between measures of religiosity/spirituality and resilience. The United States Army was criticised for promoting spirituality in its Comprehensive Soldier Fitness programme as a way to prevent PTSD, due to the lack of conclusive supporting data.

Forgiveness plays a role in resilience among patients with chronic pain (but not in the severity of the pain).

Resilience is also enhanced in people who develop effective coping skills for stress. Coping skills help people reduce stress levels, so they remain functional. Coping skills include using meditation, exercise, socialization, and self-care practices to maintain a healthy level of stress.

Bibliotherapy, positive tracking of events, and enhancing psychosocial protective factors with positive psychological resources are other methods for resilience building. Increasing a person’s arsenal of coping skills builds resilience.

A study of 230 adults, diagnosed with depression and anxiety, showed that emotional regulation contributed to resilience in patients. The emotional regulation strategies focused on planning, positively reappraising events, and reducing rumination. Patients with improved resilience experienced better treatment outcomes than patients with non-resilience focused treatment plans. This suggests psychotherapeutic interventions may better handle mental disorders by focusing on psychological resilience.

Other factors associated with resilience include the capacity to make realistic plans, self-confidence and a positive self image, communications skills, and the capacity to manage strong feelings and impulses.

Children

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are events that occur in a child’s life that could lead to maladaptive symptoms such as tension, low mood, repetitive and recurring thoughts, and avoidance of things associated with the adverse event.

Maltreated children who experience some risk factors (e.g. single parenting, limited maternal education, or family unemployment), show lower ego-resilience and intelligence than children who were not maltreated. Maltreated children are also more likely to withdraw and demonstrate disruptive-aggressive and internalised behaviour problems. Ego-resiliency and positive self-esteem predict competent adaptation in maltreated children.

Psychological resilience which helps overcome adverse events does not solely explain why some children experience post-traumatic growth and some do not.

Resilience is the product of a number of developmental processes over time that allow children to experience small exposures to adversity or age appropriate challenges and develop skills to handle those challenges. This gives children a sense of pride and self-worth.

Two “protective factors”—characteristics of children or situations that help children in the context of risk—are good cognitive functioning (like cognitive self-regulation and IQ) and positive relationships (especially with competent adults, like parents). Children who have protective factors in their lives tend to do better in some risky contexts. However, children do better when not exposed to high levels of risk or adversity.

There are a few protective factors of young children that are consistent over differences in culture and stressors (poverty, war, divorce of parents, natural disasters, etc.):

  • Capable parenting
  • Other close relationships
  • Intelligence
  • Self-control
  • Motivation to succeed
  • Self-confidence and self-efficacy
  • Faith, hope, belief life has meaning
  • Effective schools
  • Effective communities
  • Effective cultural practices

Ann Masten calls these protective factors “ordinary magic”—the ordinary human adaptive systems that are shaped by biological and cultural evolution. In her book, Ordinary Magic: Resilience in Development, she discusses the “immigrant paradox”, the phenomenon that first-generation immigrant youth are more resilient than their children. Researchers hypothesize that “there may be culturally based resiliency that is lost with succeeding generations as they become distanced from their culture of origin.” Another hypothesis is that those who choose to immigrate are more likely to be more resilient.

Neurocognitive Resilience

Trauma is defined as a emotional response to distressing event, and PTSD is a mental disorder the develops after a person has experienced a dangerous event, for instance car accident or environmental disaster. The findings of a study conducted on a sample of 226 individuals who had experienced trauma indicate a positive association between resilience and enhanced nonverbal memory, as well as a measure of emotional learning. The findings of the study indicate that individuals who exhibited resilience demonstrated a lower incidence of depressed and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. Conversely, those who lacked resilience exhibited a higher likelihood of experiencing unemployment and having a history of suicide attempts. The research additionally revealed that the experience of severe childhood abuse or exposure to trauma was correlated with a lack of resilience. The results indicate that resilience could potentially serve as a substitute measure for emotional learning, a process that is frequently impaired in stress-related mental disorders. This finding has the potential to enhance our comprehension of resilience.

Young Adults

Sports provide benefits such as social support or a boost in self confidence. The findings of a study investigating the correlation between resilience and symptom resolution in adolescents and young adults who have experienced sport-related concussions (SRC) indicate that individuals with lower initial resilience ratings tend to exhibit a higher number and severity of post-concussion symptoms (PCSS), elevated levels of anxiety and depression, and a delayed recovery process from SRC. Additionally, the research revealed that those who initially scored lower on resilience assessments were less inclined to describe a sense of returning to their pre-injury state and experienced more pronounced exacerbation of symptoms resulting from both physical and cognitive exertion, even after resuming sports or physical activity. This finding illustrates the significant impact that resilience can have on the process of physical and mental recovery.

Role of the Family

Family environments that are caring and stable, hold high expectations for children’s behaviour, and encourage participation by children in the life of the family are environments that more successfully foster resilience in children. Most resilient children have a strong relationship with at least one adult (not always a parent), and this relationship helps to diminish risk associated with family discord.

Parental resilience—the ability of parents to deliver competent high-quality parenting, despite the presence of risk factors—plays an important role in children’s resilience. Understanding the characteristics of quality parenting is critical to the idea of parental resilience. However, resilience research has focused on the well-being of children, with limited academic attention paid to factors that may contribute to the resilience of parents.

Even if divorce produces stress, the availability of social support from family and community can reduce this stress and yield positive outcomes.

A family that emphasizes the value of assigned chores, caring for brothers or sisters, and the contribution of part-time work in supporting the family helps to foster resilience.

Some practices that poor parents utilise help to promote resilience in families. These include frequent displays of warmth, affection, and emotional support; reasonable expectations for children combined with straightforward, not overly harsh discipline; family routines and celebrations; and the maintenance of common values regarding money and leisure. According to sociologist Christopher B. Doob:

“Poor children growing up in resilient families have received significant support for doing well as they enter the social world—starting in daycare programs and then in schooling.”

The Besht model of natural resilience-building through parenting, in an ideal family with positive access and support from family and friends, has four key markers:

  • Realistic upbringing
  • Effective risk communications
  • Positivity and restructuring of demanding situations
  • Building self efficacy and hardiness

In this model, self-efficacy is the belief in one’s ability to organize and execute the courses of action required to achieve goals and hardiness is a composite of interrelated attitudes of commitment, control, and challenge.

Role of the School

Resilient children in classroom environments work and play well, hold high expectations, and demonstrate locus of control, self-esteem, self-efficacy, and autonomy. These things work together to prevent the debilitating behaviours that are associated with learned helplessness.

Research on Mexican–American high school students found that a sense of belonging to school was the only significant predictor of academic resilience, though a sense of belonging to family, a peer group, and a culture can also indicate higher academic resilience. “Although cultural loyalty overall was not a significant predictor of resilience, certain cultural influences nonetheless contribute to resilient outcomes, like familism and cultural pride and awareness.” The results “indicate a negative relationship between cultural pride and the ethnic homogeneity of a school.” The researchers hypothesize that “ethnicity becomes a salient and important characteristic in more ethnically diverse settings”.

A strong connection with one’s cultural identity is an important protective factor against stress and is indicative of increased resilience.[citation needed] While classroom resources have been created to promote resilience in students, the most effective ways to ensure resilience in children is by protecting their natural adaptive systems from breaking down or being hijacked. At home, resilience can be promoted through a positive home environment and emphasizing cultural practices and values. In school, this can be done by ensuring that each student develops and maintains a sense of belonging to the school through positive relationships with classroom peers and a caring teacher. A sense of belonging—whether it be in a culture, family, or another group—predicts resiliency against any given stressor.

Role of the Community

Communities play a role in fostering resilience. The clearest sign of a cohesive and supportive community is the presence of social organisations that provide healthy human development. Services are unlikely to be used unless there is good communication about them. Children who are repeatedly relocated do not benefit from these resources, as their opportunities for resilience-building community participation are disrupted with every relocation.

Outcomes in Adulthood

Patients who show resilience to adverse events in childhood may have worse outcomes later in life. A study in the American Journal of Psychiatry interviewed 1420 participants with a Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Assessment up to 8 times as children. Of those 1,266 were interviewed as adults, and this group had higher risks for anxiety, depression and problems with work or education. This was accompanied by worse physical health outcomes. The study authors posit that the goal of public health should be to reduce childhood trauma, and not promote resilience.

Specific Situations

Divorce

Cultivating resilience may be beneficial to all parties involved in divorce. The level of resilience a child will experience after their parents have split is dependent on both internal and external variables. Some of these variables include their psychological and physical state and the level of support they receive from their schools, friends, and family friends. Children differ by age, gender, and temperament in their capacity to cope with divorce. About 20–25% of children “demonstrate severe emotional and behavioral problems” when going through a divorce, compared to 10% of children exhibiting similar problems in married families. Despite this, approximately 75–80% of these children will “develop into well-adjusted adults with no lasting psychological or behavioural problems”. This goes to show that most children have the resilience needed to endure their parents’ divorce.

The effects of the divorce extend past the separation of the parents. Residual conflict between parents, financial problems, and the re-partnering or remarriage of parents can cause stress. Studies have shown conflicting results about the effect of post-divorce conflict on a child’s healthy adjustment. Divorce may reduce children’s financial means and associated lifestyle. For example, economising may mean a child cannot continue to participate in extracurricular activities such as sports and music lessons, which can be detrimental to their social lives.

A parent’s re-partnering or remarrying can add conflict and anger to a child’s home environment. One reason re-partnering causes additional stress is because of the lack of clarity in roles and relationships; the child may not know how to react and behave with this new quasi-parent figure in their life. Bringing in a new partner/spouse may be most stressful when done shortly after the divorce. Divorce is not a single event, but encompasses multiple changes and challenges. Internal factors promote resiliency in the child, as do external factors in the environment. Certain programs such as the 14-week Children’s Support Group and the Children of Divorce Intervention Programme may help a child cope with the changes that occur from a divorce.

Bullying

Beyond preventing bullying, it is also important to consider interventions based on emotional intelligence when bullying occurs. Emotional intelligence may foster resilience in victims. When a person faces stress and adversity, especially of a repetitive nature, their ability to adapt is an important factor in whether they have a more positive or negative outcome.

One study examining adolescents who illustrated resilience to bullying found higher behavioural resilience in girls and higher emotional resilience in boys. The study’s authors suggested the targeting of psychosocial skills as a form of intervention. Emotional intelligence promotes resilience to stress and the ability to manage stress and other negative emotions can restrain a victim from going on to perpetuate aggression. Emotion regulation is an important factor in resilience. Emotional perception significantly facilitates lower negative emotionality during stress, while emotional understanding facilitates resilience and correlates with positive affect.

Natural Disasters

Resilience after a natural disaster can be gauged on an individual level (each person in the community), a community level (everyone collectively in the affected locality), and on a physical level (the locality’s environment and infrastructure).

UNESCAP-funded research on how communities show resiliency in the wake of natural disasters found that communities were more physically resilient if community members banded together and made resiliency a collective effort. Social support, especially the ability to pool resources, is key to resilience. Communities that pooled social, natural, and economic resources were more resilient and could overcome disasters more quickly than communities that took a more individualistic approach.

The World Economic Forum met in 2014 to discuss resiliency after natural disasters. They concluded that countries that are more economically sound, and whose members can diversify their livelihoods, show higher levels of resiliency. As of 2014 this had not been studied in depth, but the ideas discussed in this forum appeared fairly consistent with existing research.

Individual resilience in the wake of natural disasters can be predicted by the level of emotion the person experienced and was able to process during and following the disaster. Those who employ emotional styles of coping were able to grow from their experiences and to help others. In these instances, experiencing emotions was adaptive. Those who did not engage with their emotions and who employed avoidant and suppressive coping styles had poorer mental health outcomes following disaster.

Death of a Family Member

As of 2006 little research had been done on the topic of family resilience in the wake of the death of a family member. Clinical attention to bereavement has focused on the individual mourning process rather than on the family unit as a whole. Resiliency in this context is the “ability to maintain a stable equilibrium” that is conducive to balance, harmony, and recovery. Families manage familial distortions caused by the death of the family member by reorganising relationships and changing patterns of functioning to adapt to their new situation. People who exhibiting resilience in the wake of trauma can successfully traverse the bereavement process without long-term negative consequences.

One of the healthiest behaviours displayed by resilient families in the wake of a death is honest and open communication. This facilitates an understanding of the crisis. Sharing the experience of the death can promote immediate and long-term adaptation. Empathy is a crucial component in familial resilience because it allows mourners to understand other positions, tolerate conflict, and grapple with differences that may arise. Another crucial component to resilience is the maintenance of a routine that binds the family together through regular contact and order. The continuation of education and a connection with peers and teachers at school is an important support for children struggling with the death of a family member.

Professional Settings

Resilience has been examined in the context of failure and setbacks in workplace settings. Psychological resilience is one of the core constructs of positive organisational behaviour and has captured scholars’ and practitioners’ attention. Research has highlighted certain personality traits, personal resources (e.g. self-efficacy, work-life balance, social competencies), personal attitudes (e.g. sense of purpose, job commitment), positive emotions, and work resources (e.g. social support, positive organisational context) as potential facilitators of workplace resilience.

Attention has also been directed to the role of resilience in innovative contexts. Due to high degrees of uncertainty and complexity in the innovation process, failure and setbacks happen frequently in this context. These can harm affected individuals’ motivation and willingness to take risks, so their resilience is essential for them to productively engage in future innovative activities. A resilience construct specifically aligned to the peculiarities of the innovation context was needed to diagnose and develop innovators’ resilience: Innovator Resilience Potential (IRP). Based on Bandura’s social cognitive theory, IRP has six components: self-efficacy, outcome expectancy, optimism, hope, self-esteem, and risk propensity. It reflects a process perspective on resilience: IRP can be interpreted either as an antecedent of how a setback affects an innovator, or as an outcome of the process that is influenced by the setback situation. A measurement scale of IRP was developed and validated in 2018.

Cultural Differences

There is controversy about the indicators of good psychological and social development when resilience is studied across different cultures and contexts. The American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Resilience and Strength in Black Children and Adolescents, for example, notes that there may be special skills that these young people and families have that help them cope, including the ability to resist racial prejudice. Researchers of indigenous health have shown the impact of culture, history, community values, and geographical settings on resilience in indigenous communities. People who cope may also show “hidden resilience” when they do not conform with society’s expectations for how someone is supposed to behave (for example, in some contexts aggression may aid resilience, or less emotional engagement may be protective in situations of abuse).

Resilience in individualist and Collectivist Communities

Individualist cultures, such as those of the US, Austria, Spain, and Canada, emphasize personal goals, initiatives, and achievements. Independence, self-reliance, and individual rights are highly valued by members of individualistic cultures. The ideal person in individualist societies is assertive, strong, and innovative. People in this culture tend to describe themselves in terms of their unique traits—”I am analytical and curious”. Economic, political, and social policies reflect the culture’s interest in individualism.

Collectivist cultures, such as those of Japan, Sweden, Turkey, and Guatemala, emphasize family and group work goals. The rules of these societies promote unity, brotherhood, and selflessness. Families and communities practice cohesion and cooperation. The ideal person in collectivist societies is trustworthy, honest, sensitive, and generous—emphasizing intrapersonal skills. Collectivists tend to describe themselves in terms of their roles—”I am a good husband and a loyal friend”.

In a study on the consequences of disaster on a culture’s individualism, researchers operationalised these cultures by identifying indicative phrases in a society’s literature. Words that showed the theme of individualism include, “able, achieve, differ, own, personal, prefer, and special.” Words that indicated collectivism include, “belong, duty, give, harmony, obey, share, together.”

Differences in Response to Natural Disasters

Natural disasters threaten to destroy communities, displace families, degrade cultural integrity, and diminish an individual’s level of functioning. Comparing individualist community reactions to collectivist community responses after natural disasters illustrates their differences and respective strengths as tools of resilience.

Some suggest that because disasters strengthen the need to rely on other people and social structures, they reduce individual agency and the sense of autonomy, and so regions with heightened exposure to disaster should cultivate collectivism. However, interviews with and experiments on disaster survivors indicate that disaster-induced anxiety and stress decrease one’s focus on social-contextual information—a key component of collectivism. So disasters may increase individualism.

In a study into the association between socio-ecological indicators and cultural-level change in individualism, for each socio-ecological indicator, frequency of disasters was associated with greater (rather than less) individualism. Supplementary analyses indicated that the frequency of disasters was more strongly correlated with individualism-related shifts than was the magnitude of disasters or the frequency of disasters qualified by the number of deaths.

Baby-naming is one indicator of change. Urbanisation was linked to preference for uniqueness in baby-naming practices at a one-year lag, secularism was linked to individualist shifts in interpersonal structure at both lags, and disaster prevalence was linked to more unique naming practices at both lags. Secularism and disaster prevalence contributed mainly to shifts in naming practices.

Disaster recovery research focuses on psychology and social systems but does not adequately address interpersonal networking or relationship formation and maintenance. One disaster response theory holds that people who use existing communication networks fare better during and after disasters. Moreover, they can play important roles in disaster recovery by organising and helping others use communication networks and by coordinating with institutions.

Building strong, self-reliant communities whose members know each other, know each other’s needs, and are aware of existing communication networks, is a possible source of resilience in disasters.

Individualist societies promote individual responsibility for self-sufficiency; collectivist culture defines self-sufficiency within an interdependent communal context. Even where individualism is salient, a group thrives when its members choose social over personal goals and seek to maintain harmony, and where they value collectivist over individualist behaviour.

The Concept of Resilience in Language

While not all languages have a direct translation for the English word “resilience”, nearly every culture has a word that relates to a similar concept, suggesting a common understanding of what resilience is. Even if a word does not directly translate to “resilience” in English, it relays a meaning similar enough to the concept and is used as such within the language.

If a specific word for resilience does not exist in a language, speakers of that language typically assign a similar word that insinuates resilience based on context. Many languages use words that translate to “elasticity” or “bounce”, which are used in context to capture the meaning of resilience. For example, one of the main words for “resilience” in Chinese literally translates to “rebound”, one of the main words for “resilience” in Greek translates to “bounce” (another translates to “cheerfulness”), and one of the main words for “resilience” in Russian translates to “elasticity,” just as it does in German. However, this is not the case for all languages. For example, if a Spanish speaker wanted to say “resilience”, their main two options translate to “resistance” and “defense against adversity”. Many languages have words that translate better to “tenacity” or “grit” better than they do to “resilience”. While these languages may not have a word that exactly translates to “resilience”, English speakers often use the words tenacity or grit when referring to resilience. Arabic has a word solely for resilience, but also two other common expressions to relay the concept, which directly translate to “capacity on deflation” or “reactivity of the body”, but are better translated as “impact strength” and “resilience of the body” respectively. A few languages, such as Finnish, have words that express resilience in a way that cannot be translated back to English. In Finnish, the word and concept “sisu” has been recently studied by a designated Sisu Scale, which is composed of both beneficial and harmful sides of sisu. Sisu, measured by the Sisu Scale, has correlations with English language equivalents, but the harmful side of sisu does not seem to have any corresponding concept in English-language-based scales. Sometimes sisu has been translated to “grit” in English; sisu blends the concepts of resilience, tenacity, determination, perseverance, and courage into one word that has become a facet of Finnish culture.

Measurement

Direct Measurement

Resilience is measured by evaluating personal qualities that reflect people’s approach and response to negative experiences. Trait resilience is typically assessed using two methods: direct evaluation of traits through resilience measures, and proxy assessment of resilience, in which related psychological constructs are used to explain resilient outcomes.

There are more than 30 resilience measures that assess over 50 different variables related to resilience, but there is no universally accepted “gold standard” for measuring resilience.

Five of the established self-report measures of psychological resilience are:

  • Ego Resiliency Scale: Measures a person’s ability to exercise control over their impulses or inhibition in response to environmental demands, with the aim of maintaining or enhancing their ego equilibrium.
  • Hardiness Scale: Encompasses three main dimensions: (1) commitment (a conviction that life has purpose), (2) control (confidence in one’s ability to navigate life), and (3) challenge (aptitude for and pleasure in adapting to change)
  • Psychological Resilience Scale: Assesses a “resilience core” characterized by five traits (purposeful life, perseverance, self-reliance, equanimity, and existential aloneness) that reflect an individual’s physical and mental resilience throughout their lifespan
  • Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale: Developed in a clinical treatment setting that conceptualized resilience as arising from four factors: (1) control, commitment, and change hardiness constructs
  • Brief Resilience Scale: Assesses resilience as the capacity to bounce back from unfavourable circumstances

The Resilience Systems Scales was produced to investigate and measure the underlying structure of the 115 items from these five most-commonly cited trait resilience scales in the literature. Three strong latent factors account for most of the variance accounted for by the five most popular resilience scales, and replicated ecological systems theory:

  • Engineering resilience: The capability of a system to quickly and effortlessly restore itself to a stable equilibrium state after a disruption, as measured by its speed and ease of recovery.
  • Ecological resilience: The capacity of a system to endure or resist disruptions while preserving a steady state and adapting to necessary changes in its functioning.
  • Adaptive capacity: The ability to continuously adjust functions and processes in order to be ready to adapt to any disruption.

‘Proxy’ Measurement

Resilience literature identifies five main trait domains that serve as stress-buffers and can be used as proxies to describe resilience outcomes:

  • Personality: A resilient personality includes positive expressions of the five-factor personality traits such as high emotional stability, extraversion, conscientiousness, openness, and agreeableness.
  • Cognitive abilities and executive functions: Resilience is identified through effective use of executive functions and processing of experiential demands, or through an overarching cognitive mapping system that integrates information from current situations, prior experience, and goal-driven processes.
  • Affective systems, which include emotional regulation systems: Emotion regulation systems are based on the broaden-and-build theory, in which there is a reciprocal relationship between trait resilience and positive emotional functioning through emotional management, coping, and regulation achieved by means of attention control, cognitive reappraisal, and coping strategies.
  • Eudaimonic well-being: resilience emerges from natural well-being processes (e.g. autonomy, purpose in life, environmental mastery) and underlying genetic and neural substrates and acts as a protective resilient factor across life-span transitions.
  • Health systems: This also reflects the broaden-and-build theory, where there is a reciprocal relationship between trait resilience and positive health functioning through the promotion of feeling capable to deal with adverse health situations.

Mixed Model

A mixed model of resilience can be derived from direct and proxy measures of resilience. A search for latent factors among 61 direct and proxy resilience assessments, suggested four main factors:

  • Recovery: Resilience scales that focus on recovery, such as engineering resilience, align with reports of stability in emotional and health systems. The most fitting theoretical framework for this is the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. This theory highlights how positive emotions can foster resilient health systems and enable individuals to recover from setbacks.
  • Sustainability: Resilience scales that reflect “sustainability,” such as engineering resilience, align with conscientiousness, lower levels of dysexecutive functioning, and five dimensions of eudaimonic well-being. Theoretically, resilience is the effective use of executive functions and processing of experiential demands (also known as resilient functioning), where an overarching cognitive mapping system integrates information from current situations, prior experience, and goal-driven processes (known as the cognitive model of resilience).
  • Adaptability resilience: Resilience scales that assess adaptability, such as adaptive capacity, are associated with higher levels of extraversion (such as being enthusiastic, talkative, assertive, and gregarious) and openness-to-experience (such as being intellectually curious, creative, and imaginative). These personality factors are often reported to form a higher-order factor known as “beta” or “plasticity”, which reflects a drive for growth, agency, and reduced inhibition by preferring new and diverse experiences while reducing fixed patterns of behaviour. These findings suggest that adaptability can be seen as a complement to growth, agency, and reduced inhibition.
  • Social cohesion: Several resilience measures converge to suggest an underlying social cohesion factor, in which social support, care, and cohesion among family and friends (as featured in various scales within the literature) form a single latent factor.

These findings point to the possibility of adopting a “mixed model” of resilience in which direct assessments of resilience could be employed alongside cognate psychological measures to improve the evaluation of resilience.

Criticism

As with other psychological phenomena, there is controversy about how resilience should be defined. Its definition affects research focuses; differing or imprecise definitions lead to inconsistent research. Research on resilience has become more heterogeneous in its outcomes and measures, convincing some researchers to abandon the term altogether due to it being attributed to all outcomes of research where results were more positive than expected.

There is also disagreement among researchers as to whether psychological resilience is a character trait or state of being. Psychological resilience has also been referred to as ecological concept, ranging from micro to macro levels of interpretation.

However, it is generally agreed upon that resilience is a buildable resource. There is also evidence that resilience can indicate a capacity to resist a sharp decline in other harm even though a person temporarily appears to get worse. Adolescents who have a high level of adaptation (i.e. resilience) tend to struggle with dealing with other psychological problems later on in life. This is due to an overload of their stress response systems. There is evidence that the higher one’s resilience is, the lower one’s vulnerability.

Brad Evans and Julian Reid criticise resilience discourse and its rising popularity in their book, Resilient Life. The authors assert that policies of resilience can put the onus of disaster response on individuals rather than publicly coordinated efforts. Tied to the emergence of neoliberalism, climate change, third-world development, and other discourses, Evans and Reid argue that promoting resilience draws attention away from governmental responsibility and towards self-responsibility and healthy psychological effects such as post-traumatic growth.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_resilience >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

What is Positive Disintegration?

Published on by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

Introduction

The theory of positive disintegration (TPD) is an idea of personality development developed by Polish psychologist Kazimierz Dąbrowski.

Unlike mainstream psychology, the theory views psychological tension and anxiety as necessary for personal growth. These “disintegrative” processes are “positive”, whereas people who fail to go through positive disintegration may stop at “primary integration”, possessing individuality but nevertheless lacking an autonomous personality and remaining impressionable. Entering into disintegration and subsequent higher processes of development occurs through developmental potential, including over-excitability and hypersensitivity.

Unlike other theories of development such as Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development, it is not assumed that even a majority of people progress through all levels. TPD is not a theory of stages, and levels do not correlate with age, nor do tension and anxiety correlate to maturity.

Origins

Dąbrowski’s worldview was likely influenced by his life experiences. As a teenager in World War I, he witnessed a major battle near his village. He walked among the bodies of the dead soldiers and later recalled that the looks on their faces were wildly different—some expressed fear, some horror, while some looked calm and peaceful.

During World War II, he was imprisoned by the Nazi police several times and his wife paid ransom for his release; when Stalin seized Poland, Dąbrowski and his wife were imprisoned for 18 months. Dąbrowski said he wrote his theory to encapsulate the lowest human behaviours he had observed during the war, as well as the highest acts of self-sacrifice. He said that no other psychological theory had captured this wide range of human behaviour. After his release, his behaviour was closely monitored by the Polish authorities until at least the early 60s. In 1965 he established a base in Edmonton, Alberta, and spent the rest of his life alternating between Canada and Poland.

Dąbrowski’s Theory

The development of the theory of positive disintegration began in Dąbrowski’s earliest Polish works, as reflected in his 1929 doctoral thesis. His first work in English also contained seeds of the theory. His next major English work was his 1964 book Positive Disintegration. He proposed that the key to mental growth was having strong “developmental potential”: a constellation of psychological factors often leading to the disintegration of existing psychological structures. These disintegrations allow the individual to voluntarily reorganize their priorities and values, leading to psychological growth.

Dąbrowski’s theory of personality development emphasizes several major features, including that having a unique personality is not a universal trait: it must be created and shaped by the individual to reflect their own unique character. Personality develops as a result of developmental potential (DP), including overexcitability and the autonomous (third) factor; not everyone displays sufficient DP to move through the process of mental growth via positive disintegration.

Dąbrowski used a multilevel approach to describe the continuum of developmental levels seen in the population. In his theory, developmental potential creates crises characterised by strong anxieties and depressions (which he called psychoneurosis) that precipitate disintegrations. For personality to develop, initial integrations based on instinct and socialisation must disintegrate through a process Dąbrowski called positive disintegration. He said that the development of a hierarchy of individual values and emotional reactions was a critical component in developing one’s personality and autonomy; thus, in contrast to most psychological theories, emotions play a major role.

Emotional reactions guide the individual in creating their individual “personality ideal”, an autonomous standard that acts as the goal of individual development. Individuals must examine their essence and develop their own unique personality ideal. Only then can they make existential choices that emphasize the aspects of self that are higher and “more myself”, and inhibit those aspects that are lower or “less myself”, based upon their ideal personality; thus shaping their personality and creating an authentic self based upon the fundamental essence of the individual. Critical components of individual development include: self-education, subject-object, personality ideal, self-perfection, and autopsychotherapy.

Factors in Personality Development

Dąbrowski observed that most people live their lives in a state of “primary or primitive integration” largely guided by biological impulses (“first factor”), by uncritical endorsement and adherence to social conventions (“second factor”), or by both at once. He called this initial integration Level I. Dąbrowski observed that at this level, there is no true individual expression of the autonomous human self; the individual has no autonomous personality, and rather, they exhibit Nietzsche’s idea of the herd personality. Individual expression at Level I is influenced and constrained by the first and second factors.

The first factor directs energy and talents toward self-serving goals that reflect the “lower instincts” and biological needs, as its primary focus is on survival and self-advancement. The second factor, the social environment (milieu) and peer pressure, constrains individual expression and creativity by encouraging mob mentality and discouraging individual thought and expression. The second factor externalises values and morals, thereby externalising conscience; social forces shape behaviour. Behaviour, talents and creativity are funnelled into forms that follow and support the existing social milieu. As conscience is derived from an external social context, so long as social standards are ethical, people influenced by the second factor will behave ethically. However, if a society becomes corrupt, people strongly influenced by the second factor will not dissent. Socialisation without individual examination leads to a rote and robotic existence (the “robopath” described by Ludwig von Bertalanffy). Individual reactions are not unique, as reactions are based on the social context. According to Dąbrowski, people primarily motivated by the second factor represent a significant majority of the general population.

Dąbrowski felt that society was largely influenced by these two factors and could be characterised as operating at Level I, where the external value system absolves the individual of actual responsibility. He also described groups of people who display a different developmental course—an individualised developmental pathway. Such people break away from an automatic, rote, socialised view of life (which Dąbrowski called negative adjustment) and move into, and through, a series of personal disintegrations. Dąbrowski saw these disintegrations as a key element in the overall developmental process. Crises challenge the status quo and cause people to review the self, their ideas, values, thoughts, ideals, etc.

If development continues, one goes on to develop an individualized, conscious and critically evaluated hierarchical value structure (called positive adjustment). This hierarchy of values acts as a benchmark by which all things are now seen, and behaviour is directed by these internal values, rather than by external social mores. At these higher levels, individual values characterize an eventual second integration reflecting individual autonomy and the arrival of the individual’s true personality; each person develops their own vision of how life ought to be and lives according to that vision. This is associated with strongly individualised approaches to problem solving and creativity. One’s talents and creativity are applied in the service of these higher individual values and visions of how life could, and should, be. The person expresses their “new” autonomous personality energetically through action, art, social change, and so on.

Development Potential

Advanced development is often seen in people who exhibit strong developmental potential. Developmental potential represents a constellation of features: it may be positive or negative, it may be strong or weak. If it is strong, the input of the environment is minimal. If it is weak, the environment will play a critical role. Many factors are incorporated into developmental potential but three major aspects are overexcitability, one’s specific abilities and talents, and a strong drive toward autonomous growth (a feature Dąbrowski called the “third factor”).

Overexcitability

The most evident aspect of developmental potential is overexcitability (OE), a heightened physiological experience of stimuli resulting from increased neuronal sensitivities. The greater the OE, the more intense the day-to-day experiences of life. Dąbrowski outlined five forms of OE: psychomotor, sensual, imaginational, intellectual, and emotional. These overexcitabilities, especially the last three, often cause a person to experience daily life more intensely and to feel the joys and sorrows of life more profoundly. Dąbrowski studied human exemplars and found that heightened overexcitability was a key part of their developmental and life experience. These people are steered and driven by their values and their experiences of emotional OE. Combined with imaginational and intellectual OE, these people have an intense and multilevel perception of the world.

Although based in the nervous system, overexcitabilities are expressed psychologically through the development of structures that reflect the emerging autonomous self. The most important of these are “dynamisms”—the biological or mental forces that control behaviour and development. As used by Dąbrowski, dynamisms are instincts, drives, and intellectual processes combined with emotions. With advanced development, dynamisms increasingly reflect movement toward personal autonomy.

Abilities and Talents

The second aspect of developmental potential—specific abilities, and talents—tends to conform to the developmental level. At lower levels people use talents to support egocentric goals or to climb the social and corporate ladders. At higher levels, specific talents and abilities become an important force as the person uses their hierarchy of values to express, and achieve, their vision of their ideal personality and their view of how the world should be.

The Third Factor

According to Dąbrowski, the third factor of developmental potential (DP) is a drive toward individual growth and autonomy. He saw this as a critical factor in applying one’s talents and creativity toward autonomous expression, and in providing motivation to strive for more and to try to imagine (and achieve) goals currently beyond one’s grasp. Dąbrowski was clear to differentiate this third factor from free will. He felt that free will did not go far enough in capturing the motivating aspects that he attributed to this third factor, for example, an individual can exercise free will and show little motivation to grow or change as an individual. The third factor specifically describes motivation—a motivation to become one’s own true self. This motivation is often so strong that a person can find that they must develop themself, despite putting themself in danger by doing so. This feeling of “I’ve gotta be me”, especially when it is “at any cost”, and is expressed as a strong motivator for self-growth, is beyond the usual conceptualisation free will.

Dąbrowski’s theory says that a person whose DP is high enough will generally undergo disintegration, despite any external social or family efforts to prevent it; whereas person whose DP is very low will generally not undergo disintegration (or positive personality growth) even in a conducive environment. Dąbrowski’s notion of overexcitability appears to have been developed independently of Elaine Aron’s highly sensitive person, as her approach is substantially different.

Developmental Obstacles

Dąbrowski called overexcitability “a tragic gift” to reflect that the road of the person with strong OE is not a smooth or easy one. Potentials to experience great highs are also potentials to experience great lows. Similarly, potentials to express great creativity come with the potential of experiencing a great deal of personal conflict and stress. This stress drives development and is a result of conflict—both socially and within oneself. Suicide is a significant risk in the acute phases of this stress, and the isolation often experienced at this stage may also heighten the risk of self-harm.

Dąbrowski advocated autopsychotherapy, educating the person about his theory and the disintegrative process to give them a context within which to understand their intense feelings and needs. Dąbrowski suggested giving people support in their efforts to develop and find their own self-expression. According to Dąbrowski, both children and adults with high DP (and OE) have to find and walk their own path, often at the expense of fitting in with their social peers and even with their families. At the core of autopsychotherapy is the awareness that no one can show anyone else the “right” path—everyone has to find their own path for themselves. Alluding to the knights on the Grail Quest, the Jungian analyst, Joseph Campbell allegedly said: “If a path exists in the forest, don’t follow it, for though it took someone else to the Grail, it will not take you there, because it is not your path.”

Levels

The first and fifth levels of Dąbrowski’s theory of Positive Disintegration are characterized by psychological integration, harmony, and little inner conflict. There is little internal conflict at Level I because at this level one can almost always justify their behaviour – it is either for their own good and is therefore “right”, or society endorses it and it is therefore “right”. In either case, the individual confidently acts as they think anyone else would and does what everyone is “supposed to do”. Dąbrowski compared this to Level V, where there is no internal conflict because what a person does is in harmony with their own internal sense of values. Regardless of internal conflict, external conflict can, and does, still occur.

Dąbrowski used Levels II, III, and IV to describe various degrees and types of disintegration. He was very clear that the levels he presents “represent a heuristic device”. Accordingly, in the process of developing the structures, two or even three contiguous levels may exist side by side, although they exist in conflict. The conflict is resolved when one of the structures is eliminated, or comes under complete control of another structure.

Level I: Primary Integration

The first level is called primitive or primary integration. People at this level are often influenced primarily by either the first factor (heredity/impulse), the second factor (social environment), or both. The majority of people at Level I are integrated at the environmental or social level (Dąbrowski called them average people). Dąbrowski distinguished the two subgroups of Level I by degree: “the state of primary integration is a state contrary to mental health. A fairly high degree of primary integration is present in the average person; a very high degree of primary integration is present in the psychopath.” Marked by selfishness and egocentrism (both covert and explicit), those at level one generally seek self-fulfilment above all else, justifying their pursuits through a sort of “it’s all about me” thinking. They adhere strongly to the phrase “the ends justifies the means”, and may disregard the severity of the “means”. Many people who are considered “leaders” fall into this category.

The vast majority of people do not break down their primitive integration at all, and those who do after a relatively short period of disintegration, usually during adolescence and early youth, either reintegrate at level one, or partially integrate of some of the functions of higher levels, but do not experience a transformation of their whole mental structure. Dąbrowski thought that primary integration in the average person could be of value as it is stable and predictable, and, when accompanied by kindness and good-will, could represent those who can provide support and stability to people experiencing disintegration.

Level II: Unilevel Disintegration

The prominent feature of this level is an initial, brief, and often intense crisis, or series of crises. Crises are spontaneous and occur on only one level—though they may appear to be different choices, they are ultimately on the same, horizontal, level.

Unilevel disintegration occurs during developmental crises such as puberty or menopause, in periods of difficulty handling an external stressful event, or under psychological conditions such as nervousness and psychoneurosis. Unilevel disintegration occurs on a single structural and emotional level; there is a prevalence of automatic dynamisms with only slight self-consciousness and self-control.

Horizontal conflicts produce ambitendencies and ambivalences: one is equally attracted by different but equivalent choices (ambitendencies) and is not able to decide what to do as they have no real preference between the choices (ambivalences). Ultimately, if developmental forces are strong enough, the person is thrust into an existential crisis as their social rationales no longer account for their experiences and there is no alternative explanation. During this phase, existential despair is the predominant emotion. The resolution of this phase begins as individually chosen values start to replace rote, ingrained, social mores and are integrated into a new hierarchy of personal values. These new values often conflict with the person’s previous social values. Many of the status quo explanations for the “way things are”, learned through education and society, collapse under this scrutiny. This causes additional conflicts focused on the person’s analysis of their reactions to the world at large and the behaviour of themself and others. Common behaviours, and the ethics of the prevailing social norm, come to be seen as inadequate, wrong or hypocritical; positive maladjustment prevails. For Dąbrowski, these crises represent a strong potential for development toward personal growth and mental health. Using a positive definition, mental health reflects more than social conformity: it involves a careful, personal examination of the world and of one’s values, leading to the development of an individual personality.

Level II is a transitional period. Dąbrowski said a person will either fall back (reintegration on a lower level), move ahead to Level III, or the crises will end negatively, in suicide or psychosis. The transition from Level II to Level III involves a fundamental shift that requires a phenomenal amount of energy. This period is the crossroads of development, from here one must either progress or regress. The struggle between Dąbrowski’s three factors reflects this transitional crisis: “Do I follow my instincts (first factor), my teachings (second factor) or my heart (third factor)?” The developmental answer is to transform one’s lower instincts (automatic reactions like anger) into positive motivation, to resist rote and social answers, and to listen to one’s inner sense of what one ought to do.

Level III: Spontaneous Multilevel Disintegration

Level III describes a new type of conflict—a vertical conflict between two alternatives that are not simply different, but that exist on different levels; one is genuinely higher and the other lower. These vertical conflicts initially arise from involuntary perceptions of higher versus lower choices in life. In the words of G.K. Chesterton: “You just look at something, maybe for the 1000th time, and it strikes you—you see this one thing differently and once you do, it changes things. You can no longer ‘go back and see it the way you did before.'” Dąbrowski called this vertical dimension multilevelness, and saw it as a gradual realization of the “possibility of the higher” (a phrase Dąbrowski used frequently), and of the contrasts between the higher and the lower in life. These vertical comparisons often contrast the lower, actual, behaviour of a person with the higher, imagined ideals, and to alternative idealised choices. Dąbrowski believed that the authentic individual would choose the higher path as the clear and obvious one to follow, erasing the ambivalences and ambitendencies of unilevel conflicts. If the person’s actual behaviour subsequently falls short of the ideal, internal disharmony and a drive to review and reconstruct one’s life will often follow. Multilevelness thus represents a new and powerful type of conflict that drives development.

Vertical conflicts are critical in leading to autonomy and advanced personality growth. If the person is to achieve higher levels, the shift to multilevelness must occur. If a person does not have the developmental potential to move into a multilevel view, then they will fall back from the crises of Level II to reintegrate at Level I. In the shift to multilevelness, the horizontal (unilevel) stimulus-response model of life is replaced by a vertical and hierarchical analysis. This vertical view becomes anchored by the individual’s emerging value structure, and all events are now seen in relation to their ideal values and how they want to live their life. As events in life are seen in relation to this multilevel, vertical view, it becomes impossible to support positions that favour a lower course of action when higher goals can be imagined and identified.

Level IV: Directed Multilevel Disintegration

In Level IV the person takes full control of their development. The involuntary spontaneous development of Level III is replaced by a deliberate, conscious, self-directed review of life from the multilevel perspective. This level marks the emergence of the third factor, described by Dąbrowski as an autonomous factor “of conscious choice (valuation) by which one affirms or rejects certain qualities in oneself and in one’s environment.” The person consciously reviews their existing belief system and tries to replace lower, automatic views and reactions with carefully thought out, examined and chosen ideals. These new values will increasingly be reflected in the person’s behaviour. Behaviour becomes less reactive, less automatic and more deliberate as choices increasingly fall under the influence of the person’s higher, chosen, ideals.

Social mores are reviewed and may be consciously re-accepted and internalised, or rejected and replaced by a self-determined alternative value system. One’s social views come to reflect a deep responsibility based on both intellectual and emotional factors. At the highest levels, “individuals of this kind feel responsible for the realization of justice and for the protection of others against harm and injustice. Their feelings of responsibility extend almost to everything.” This perspective results from seeing life in relation to one’s hierarchy of values (the multilevel view) and the subsequent appreciation of the potential of how life could, and ought to, be lived. Disagreements with a world operating at a lower level are expressed compassionately by doing what one can to help achieve the “ought”.

Given their genuine, authentic, prosocial outlook, people achieving higher developmental levels also raise the level of their society; prosocial, as used here, is not just support of the existing social order. If the social order is lower and you are adjusted to it, then you also reflect the lower (negative adjustment in Dąbrowski’s terms, a Level I feature). Here, prosocial means a genuine cultivation of social interactions based on higher values. These positions often conflict with the status quo of a lower society (positive maladjustment). In other words, to be maladjusted in a low-level society is a positive feature.

Level V: Secondary Integration

The fifth level displays an integrated and harmonious character, but one vastly different from that at the first level. At this highest level, one’s behaviour is guided by conscious, carefully weighed decisions based on an individualised and chosen hierarchy of personal values. Behaviour conforms to the person’s inner standard of how life ought to be lived, and thus little inner conflict arises.

Level V is often marked by creative expression. Especially at Level V, problem solving and art represent the highest and most noble features of human life. Art captures the innermost emotional states and is based on a deep empathy and understanding of the subject, often human suffering and sacrifice are the subjects of these works. Truly visionary works, works that are unique and novel, are created by people expressing a vision unrestrained by convention. Advances in society, through politics, philosophy and religion, are therefore commonly associated with strong individual creativity and personal accomplishments.

Applications in Therapy

The theory of positive disintegration has an extremely broad scope with many implications. One central application applies to psychological and psychiatric diagnosis and treatment. Dąbrowski advocated a comprehensive, multidimensional diagnosis of the person’s situation, symptoms and developmental potential. Accordingly, if the disintegration appears to fit into a developmental context, then the person is educated in the theory and encouraged to take a developmental view of their situation and experiences. Rather than being eliminated, symptoms are reframed to yield insight and understanding into life and the person’s unique situation.

The Importance of Narratives

Dąbrowski illustrated his theory through autobiographies of and biographies about those who have experienced positive disintegration. The gifted child, the suicidal teen, or the troubled artist is often experiencing the features of TPD, and if they accept and understand the meaning of their intense feelings and crises, they can move ahead, not fall apart. The completion of an extensive autobiography to help the individual gain perspective on their past and present is an important component in the autopsychotherapy process. In this process, the therapist plays a very small role and acts more as an initial stimulus than an ongoing therapist. Dąbrowski asked clients to read his books and to see how his ideas might relate to their lives.

Autopsychotherapy

For Dąbrowski, the goal of therapy is to eliminate the therapist by providing a context within which a person can understand and help themself – an approach to therapy that he called autopsychotherapy. The client is encouraged to embark on a journey of self-discovery, with an emphasis on looking for the contrast between what is higher versus what is lower within their personality and value structure. They are encouraged to further explore their value structure, especially as it relates to the rationale and justification of their positions; discrepancies between values and behaviour are highlighted. The approach is called autopsychotherapy to emphasize the important role that the individual must play in their own therapy process and in the larger process of personality development. The individual must come to see themselves as being in charge of determining or creating their own unique personality ideal and value structure. This includes a critical review of the social mores and values they have learned.

Dąbrowski was very concerned about what he called one-sided development, in which people display significant advanced development in only one aspect of life, usually intellectual. He believed that it is crucial to balance one’s development.

Overexcitability

In describing overexcitability (OE), Dąbrowski emphasized two main aspects: higher-than-average sensitivity, and higher-than-average responsiveness, of the nerves to stimuli. Dąbrowski explained, “The prefix ‘over’ attached to ‘excitability’ serves to indicate that the reactions of excitation are over and above average in intensity, duration and frequency.” If someone has strong OE, they will need less stimuli to cause a reaction and the reaction will be stronger than an individual who does not demonstrate overexcitability.

Dąbrowski reminded clients that without internal unease there is little stimulus for change or growth. Rather than trying to rapidly ameliorate symptoms, this approach encourages individuals to fully experience their feelings and to try to maintain a positive and developmental outlook regarding what they may perceive as strong depression or anxiety. An emphasis is placed on the client becoming aware that they can consciously control the direction of their life and apply what Dabrowski called autopsychotherapy.

Key Ideas

Dąbrowski based his theory on certain key ideas:

  • Lower animal instincts (first factor) must be inhibited and transformed into “higher” forces for people to be truly human as this ability to transform instincts is what separates people from other animals.
  • The common initial personality integration, based upon socialization (second factor), does not reflect true personality.
  • At the initial level of integration, there is little internal conflict as when one “goes along with the group”, there is little sense of individual wrongdoing. External conflicts often relate to the blockage of social goals—career frustrations for example. The social mores and values prevail with little question or conscious examination.
  • True personality must be based upon a system of values that are consciously and volitionally chosen by the person to reflect their own individual sense of “how life ought to be” and their “personality ideal” – the ideal person they feel they “ought to be”.
  • The lower animal instincts, the forces of peer groups, and socialisation are inferior to the autonomous self (personality) consciously constructed by the person.
  • To break down the initial integration, crises and disintegrations are needed, usually provided by life experience.
  • These disintegrations are positive if the person can achieve positive and developmental solutions to the situation.
  • “Unilevel crises” are not developmental as the person can only choose between equal alternatives, such as whether to go left or right.
  • A new type of perception involves “multilevelness”, a vertical view of life that compares lower versus higher alternatives and now allows the individual to choose a higher resolution to a crisis over other available, but lower, alternatives—the developmental solution.
  • “Positive disintegration” is a vital developmental process.
  • Developmental potential describes the forces needed to achieve autonomous personality development.
  • Developmental potential includes several factors including innate abilities and talents, “overexcitability” and the “third factor”.
  • Overexcitability is a measure of an individual’s nervous system’s level of response.
  • Overexcitability, or an overly sensitive nervous system, makes one prone to angst, depression and anxiety. Dąbrowski’s calls these psychoneuroses—a very positive and developmental feature.
  • The third factor is a measure of an individual’s drive toward autonomy.
  • When multilevel and autonomous development is achieved, a secondary integration is seen reflecting one’s mature personality. The individual has no inner conflict; they are in internal harmony as their actions reflect their deeply felt hierarchy of values.

Dąbrowski’s approach is of interest philosophically as it is Platonic, reflecting the bias of Plato toward seeing an individual’s essence as a critical determinant of their developmental course in life. However, Dąbrowski also added a major existential aspect as well, one that depends upon the anxieties a person feels and on how they resolve the day-to-day challenges they face. According to Dąbrowski’s theory, essence must be realised through an existential and experiential process of development. The characterisation advanced by Kierkegaard of “Knights of faith” may be compared to Dąbrowski’s autonomous individual.

Dąbrowski also reviewed the role of logic and reasoning in personal development and concluded that intellect alone does not fully help people know what to do in life. His theory incorporates Jean Piaget’s views of development into a broader scheme guided by emotion, as the emotions one feels about something are the more accurate guide to life’s major decisions.

Secondary Integration versus Self-Actualisation

People[example needed] have often equated Maslow’s concept of self-actualisation with Dąbrowski’s idea of secondary integration, despite there being some major differences between the two ideas. Dąbrowski, a personal friend and correspondent of Maslow, rejected Abraham Maslow’s description of self-actualisation. Actualisation of an undifferentiated self is not a developmental outcome in Dąbrowski’s theory, whereas Maslow described self-actualisation as a process where the self is accepted “as is”, with both higher and lower aspects of the self being actualised. For Maslow, self-actualisation involved “being all that one can be and accepting one’s deeper self in all its aspects”.

Dąbrowski instead applied a multilevel (vertical) approach to self. He spoke of the need to become aware of and inhibit and reject the lower instinctual aspects of the intrinsic human self, and to actively choose and assemble higher elements into a new unique self. Dąbrowski would have people differentiate the initial self into higher and lower aspects, and reject the lower and actualise the higher aspects to create their unique personality; Maslow would have people “embrace without guilt” all aspects.

Dąbrowski introduces the notion that although the lower aspects may initially be intrinsic to the self, people can develop a self-awareness of their lower nature and discover how they feel about these low levels. If they feel badly about behaving in these ways, they can cognitively and volitionally decide to inhibit and eliminate these behaviours; Dąbrowski called this personality shaping. In this way, the higher aspects of the self are actualised while the lower aspects are inhibited. For Dąbrowski, this inhibition is the unique aspect of humans sets people apart from other animals – no other animal is able to differentiate their lower instincts and inhibit their animalistic impulses, an idea also expressed in Plessner’s eccentricity.

Dąbrowski and the Gifted Individual

An appendix to Dąbrowski (1967) reports the results of investigations done in 1962 where “a group of [Polish] gifted children and young people aged 8 to 23” were examined.  Of the 80 youth studied, 30 were “intellectually gifted” and 50 were from “drama, ballet, and plastic art schools”. 

Dąbrowski found that every one of the children displayed overexcitability

Which constituted the foundation for the emergence of neurotic and psychoneurotic sets. Moreover it turned out that these children also showed sets of nervousness, neurosis, and psychoneurosis of various kinds and intensities, from light vegetative symptoms, or anxiety symptoms, to distinctly and highly intensive psychasthenic or hysterical sets.

Dąbrowski asked why these children would display such “states of nervousness or psychoneurosis” and suggested that it was due to the presence of OE. 

Probably the cause is more than average sensitivity which not only permits one to achieve outstanding results in learning and work, but at the same time increases the number of points sensitive to all experiences that may accelerate anomalous reactions revealing themselves in psychoneurotic sets.

The association between OE and giftedness has been the topic of extensive research done by Michael Piechowski and colleagues Lysy and Miller. It appears that intellectual OE is a marker of potential for giftedness/creativity, and that other types of OE may be as well. Dąbrowski’s thesis is that the gifted will disproportionately display this process of positive disintegration and personality growth.

Criticism

For the last 40 years, efforts to measure Dabrowskian constructs have been limited to looking at overexcitability. The most widely known instrument is the Overexcitability Questionnaire-Two.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_disintegration >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.