Resilient Individuals 1 Resilient Individuals Reform Their Assumptive Worlds after Stressful Life Events

Individuals develop core attitudes and beliefs that bring a sense of reality and purpose to their lives. They make up one’s assumptive world. After a particular trauma or stressful life event, one’s assumptive world is disrupted because individuals are confronted with inconsistent data that cannot be readily assimilated with their preexisting assumptions. Thus, he or she is forced to learn to cope with the situation and reappraise, or reevaluate, his or her core attitudes and beliefs. Successful coping and flexible adaption to changing demands of stressful experiences is referred to as psychological resilience. By using a survey that questioned participants about a stressful event, I hypothesized that resilient individuals would utilize accommodative-focused coping to maintain their assumptions and be able to achieve positive growth and transformation. It was found that resilient individuals maintained all assumptions, except in believing that the world is still meaningful. In addition, resilience was found to be predictive of using accommodative-focused coping and of experiencing positive growth after a stressful event. Thus, this research implies that a resilient individual is unable to justify why the event occurred to a decent and worthy person. Resilient Individuals 3 Introduction The general thought is that emotions result from an individual’s specific response or appraisal of his or her environment (Smith & Lazarus, 1990). The person then adapts to the situation in ways that are intended to realize goals, beliefs, and abilities and to promote survival and growth in avoidance of harm and threat. I was interested in investigating how different individuals appraise traumatic or stressful incidents. Specifically, I looked at resilient individuals and how they coped with the trauma. Using a retrospective questionnaire, I examined how their attitudes and beliefs about the world and about themselves changed after the event. By being able to evaluate the situation as beneficial or harmful, the individual can automatically or consciously decide how they need to properly react if the situation could potentially be damaging to the self. If we know how someone would evaluate the environment, we can predict the person’s emotional reaction (Smith & Lazarus, 1990). Since different individuals bring forth different personality characteristics and past experiences, they may appraise situations differently. Similar situations have varying importance and relevance to different individuals. An event such as losing a job can be traumatic to an individual who is without financial backing or does not have the personal skills to obtain another job. However, if a different individual loses a job, he or she can appraise the situation as something that can result in personal growth because he or she feels capable of overcoming this setback. His or her emotional reaction will be more positive because of this appraisal pattern. The potential threat of losing one’s self-esteem is avoided because of the way he or she appraised the situation. There are two types of appraisal categories: primary and secondary appraisal. Primary appraisal is defined as whether the encounter is relevant to the person’s well being while Resilient Individuals 4 secondary appraisal is related to the person’s resources for coping with the encounter (Smith & Lazarus, 1990). Primary appraisal determines the intensity of the resulting emotional reaction in that emotions are stronger as the appraised importance increases (Smith & Kirby, 2009). Secondary appraisal has three components: accountability, coping potential, and future expectancy (Smith & Lazarus, 1990). If a particular trauma or stressful event has occurred, one’s appraisal of the relevance of certain situations can be transformed. Kauffman (2002) describes how individuals’ core attitudes and beliefs, such as how people behave and their ability to influence events, make up their assumptive world. These assumptions are learned and are proved viable through interactions with the social world. Similar to schemas, or abstract knowledge structures, our attitudes and beliefs provide us with a network of information about the world and the self (Janoff-Bulman, 1989). They help dictate how individuals will appraise a situation’s significance. These cognitive assumptions are what grounds, secures, and stabilizes an individual. They bring a sense of reality and purpose to a person’s life. These assumptions give structure to events in an individual’s world and contribute to how people and events in the world are perceived and understood (Cann, et al., 2009). Our understanding of how things work in the world is integral to our ability to predict the future and maintain a sense of control, security, and generalized hope (Clark and Kissane, 2002). Thus, our core attitudes and beliefs form our appraisal of a situation, which then predicts the emotion one experiences after a particular situation. The constancy of our beliefs are so embedded and accepted in ourselves that they make up one’s self-worth. There are three global assumptions that exist: the perception that the world is meaningful, the belief that the world and the people in the world are benevolent, and that the Resilient Individuals 5 self is viewed as positive and has worth (Kauffman, 2002). Past research has demonstrated that people are resistant to changes in their attitudes and beliefs (Janoff-Bulman, 1989). However, if there is a disruption of the assumptive world, by the act of a personal suffering or a global, traumatizing situation, we lose our beliefs about the goodness and the meaningfulness of the world. Individuals believed that these events could never happen to them. However, these events are too vivid and emotionally damaging to not force someone to rework his or her basic assumptions. Before the crisis, our assumptions have gone unquestioned and unchallenged. Now, the individual feels disoriented, insecure, unsafe, and vulnerable (Janoff-Bulman, 1989). Thus, coping is involved in reconstructing these core beliefs and recreating an individual’s assumptive world (Clark and Kissane, 2002). Problem-focused and accommodative-focused coping are two strategies that people utilize to regulate stress. Problem-focused coping is where someone tries to change a situation through gathering information or decision-making. The person evaluates his or her ability to act directly upon the situation to make it more congruent with one’s goals. If someone feels determined in a stressful situation, he or she has a high PFCP, but if he or she is experiencing resignation, he or she will have a low PFCP. Accommodative-focused (or emotion-focused) coping refers to the ability to adjust psychologically to the encounter should it turn out undesirable. One can do this by distancing, seeking emotional support, or avoidance if the situation is not congruent with one’s goals (Smith & Lazarus, 1990). After a trauma, individuals can react in different ways, including self-blame, reinterpreting the victimization in a positive light, denial, and having recurrent intrusive thoughts (Janoff-Bulman, 1989). Individuals can selectively distort the traumatizing information to reduce its negative impact (Collins, Taylor, and Skokan, 1990). Stress occurs when there is a gap between what an individual wants and the resources the individual has. If the situation is Resilient Individuals 6 particularly important and relevant to goals, stress is even more heightened (Smith & Lazarus, 1990). The stressful situation puts the individual in a place where the future is unknown, which can lead to feelings of apprehension and threat. The person may not be able to change the situation, resolve the problem, or remove himself from it. They have lost a sense of control and mastery over life. Since one’s assumptions are shattered, how one normally appraises the world and self is also altered. The universal illusion of invulnerability, or the feeling that “it can never happen to me,” is completely repudiated (Janoff-Bulman, 1989). Overcoming a stressful event can also result in positive emotions and actions such as rejuvenated sense of hope, reappraisal of one’s life, gaining of knowledge, and reordering of personal priorities (Collins, Taylor, and Skokan, 1990). Individuals can look for perceived gains from the event or try to believe that the self is still a worthwhile person because he or she has survived the event. The research concerning negative outcomes has focused on the direct impact after the event, while positive outcomes were found in the person’s active coping efforts in response to the event when trying to modify the direct impact of the event (Collins, Taylor, and Skokan, 1990). A balanced assumptive world that includes the traumatic experience and one’s new core beliefs is now created. It is important to note that the trauma is not erased from one’s memory, but rather is permanently encoded. Having one’s assumptive world shattered can be traumatizing, and stressful life events seem to be universal occurrences. However, individuals are still able to sustain healthy psychological and physical well being. How can people bounce back so quickly? They have the capacity to achieve resilience. Resilience can be defined as the process of utilizing positive emotions and adaptation to bounce back from a negative or stressful life event (Campbell-Sills, Resilient Individuals 7 Cohan, & Stein, 2006). Certain external protective factors have been found to promote resilience such as supportive social networks and positive attachments with caregivers. Almost all individuals have the capacity to demonstrate resilience after exposure to a traumatic event. Individuals may experience some short-term damage in their emotional and physical well-being, but for the majority of the population, resilience takes over and people’s negative reactions are relatively brief (Campbell-Sills, Cohan, & Stein, 2006).