Strength in the face of adversity: individual and social thriving - Thriving: Broadening the Paradigm Beyond Illness to Health

Dennis Wholey (1992) celebrates the power of the human spirit to live when life seems hopeless in his book When the Worst That Can Happen Already Has. Sooner or later, everyone encounters adversity in life. Suffering is a part of human experience, and major hardship makes its way into everyone's lives. Wholey's work is filled with first-person testimonials about conquering and benefiting from life's most difficult times. In it, the reader meets a group of modern-day heroes and sheroes - people with inner strength, unshakable faith, and a sense of hope that enabled them to triumph when life was at its darkest.

Some of the people Wholey interviews are already well known for their personal and professional struggles - Robert Bjork, Betty Ford, and Larry King, for example - whereas others are less famous but equally effective and instructive. Divorce, disability, illness, professional defeat, and loneliness are some of the many hardships faced by his brave and victorious contributors. Former President Ronald Reagan's Press Secretary Jim Brady's tale of survival and comeback and the moving story of Georgann Fuller, a woman who lost her husband on PanAm Flight 103, show the depth of human pain and the power of healing. All of these stories are inspiring. They illustrate the strength in the face of adversity that resonates for everyone and that everyone hopes to emulate if faced with similar challenges.

Despite the American public's fascination with the ways that others manage to get beyond pain and use adversity as a means to grow, psychologists have until quite recently maintained a determined focus on the pathogenic when attempting to explain individual and societal behavior in response to major stressors. In trying to understand the pathology of disadvantage, risk factors have been catalogued and their .adverse effects on healthy development documented (Dryfoos, 1990; Hawkins, Catalano, & Miller, 1992; Newcomb & Felix-Orton, 1992). For example, risk factors have been studied for psychopathology, alcohol and drug abuse, and delinquency (Zimmerman & Arunkumar, 1994).

Psychologists have recently called for a move away from vulnerability/deficit models to focus instead on triumphs in the face of adversity (cf. O'Leary & Ickovics, 1995; Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1995). This call for a focus on strengths parallels that of a number of other investigators in child development (e.g., Garmezy, 1991; Werner & Smith, 1977), medical sociology (Antonovsky, 1994), and education (Dubois, Felner, Brand, Adam, & Evans, 1992). The potential theoretical, empirical and policy significance of the proposed paradigm shift from illness to health, from vulnerability to thriving, from deficit to protection and beyond ought not be underestimated. The precedent for this paradigm shift is growing in the scientific literature.

For example, Seligman (1975), widely known for his work on learned helplessness in the 1970s, has reoriented the focus of his research toward Learned Optimism (Seligman, 1990). According to Seligman, explanatory style, or the way in which people explain their setbacks to themselves, is learned early in life and dictates whether individuals rise above failure or accept it. Seligman not only explores the consequences of a positive or optimistic style, but he also addresses how a negative explanatory style can be changed into a positive one. This new conception may be particularly important because optimism is associated with positive immunological functioning and health (cf. Scheier & Carver, 1992, for review).

Another example of this paradigmatic shift may be found in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when most AIDS research focused on HIV transmission and disease progression. Recently, some investigators have sought to explain why certain individuals who are repeatedly exposed to HIV remain seronegative (e.g., sexual partners of persons with HIV; Clerici et al., 1992) and why others infected more than a decade ago have remained asymptomatic (cf. Hardy, 1991, for review). These investigators have explored correlates of protection as well as factors that may influence long-term survival, outcomes that may be labeled resilient.

Models of Resiliency

The study of thriving grew out of a foundation of research on resilience. Researchers have described several mechanisms by which environmental and individual factors help reduce or offset the adverse effects of risk factors. Although different researchers have sometimes suggested different models, many have given the same mechanisms different names. Garmezy and his colleagues (Garmezy, Masten, & Tellegen, 1984) have identified three models used to describe the impact of stress on the quality of adaptation: the compensatory model, the challenge model, and the protective factor or immunity versus vulnerability model.

Compensatory Model

A compensatory factor is a variable that neutralizes exposure to risk (Garmezy, et al., 1984). It does not interact with a risk factor; rather, it has a direct and independent influence on the outcome of interest. Both risk and compensatory factors contribute additively to the prediction of outcome (Masten, Garmezy, Tellegen, Pelligrini, Larkin, & Larsen, 1988).