Handbook of Positive Psychology Phần 8 ppt

It has been argued that if sense-making is going to emerge from a negative event, it should do so within several months of the event Wortman, Silver, & Kessler, 1993, and that individual

ics, such as the description of the room in which

they were seated

Whereas writing about traumas produced

in-creased health benefits as compared with

con-trols, in a variety of more recent studies,

re-searchers have shown that simply writing about

one’s thoughts and feelings about coming to

college, or about the experience of getting laid

off (in the case of the unemployed engineers),

produced comparable salubrious health

out-comes Similarly, when students were asked to

write about imaginary traumas as though they

had lived through them, they evidenced similar

health benefits as compared with individuals

who wrote about their own trauma (Greenberg,

Stone, & Wortman, 1996)

The venting of emotions per se appears

in-sufficient in the absence of cognitive processing

Although such venting may bring about

sub-jective improvements and self-reports of

im-proved mental health, health gains appear to

re-quire the translating of one’s experiences into

language This was demonstrated in a study in

which participants were asked either to express

a traumatic experience using bodily movement,

to express an experience using movement and

then write about it, or to exercise in a prescribed

manner for 3 days, 10 minutes per day Only

the “movement plus writing” group evinced

significant improvements in physical health and

grade point average (Krantz & Pennebaker,

1997) It is clear from all the studies that

ex-ploring emotions and thoughts—regardless of

the content—is critical for the elicitation of

health benefits

Based on his meta-analysis, Smyth (1998)

concludes that emotional disclosure is a

nec-essary but not sufficient factor to beget the

benefits from writing about trauma Recent

re-search findings support a two-step,

multidimen-sional approach to explain the effects of

disclo-sure First, confiding traumas (a) reduces the

physiological arousal associated with inhibition

and (b) increases one’s ability to understand and

integrate the experience (Salovey, Rothman, &

Rodin, 1998) Furthermore, as we will explain

subsequently, it appears that one specific style

of emotional confrontation is more effective

than the others

Cognitive Processes

In speaking to participants in the experimental

conditions of the original writing studies, it was

clear that they were gaining more through the

writing than simply disclosing would suggest

In listening to the words that participants used

to recount their experiences—such as “realize,”

“understand,” “come to terms,” and “gettingpast”—we gleaned that the writing was foster-ing a better understanding of both themselvesand the situations about which they wrote On

an intuitive level, it seemed that an individual’scognitive reorganization was crucial for the pos-itive outcomes we had been witnessing

In two more systematic examinations, thispoint was substantiated: first in a topical anal-ysis of the writings and, second, in a computerprogram that analyzed the linguistic compo-nents in more detail In the first analysis, in-dependent raters assessed the writing samples ofparticipants whose health improved after writ-ing, as compared with those whose health re-mained unchanged Writing samples of partici-pants who improved were judged to be moreself-reflective, emotionally open, and thought-ful

To investigate further the specific languagethat led to these assessments, we then developed

a computerized text analysis program that coulddetect emotional and cognitive categories ofwords The computer program, Linguistic Anal-ysis and Word Count (LIWC), allowed us toreanalyze previous writing studies and linkword usage among individuals in the experi-mental conditions with various health and be-havioral outcomes LIWC detects 70 word cat-egories, 4 of which are of primary relevance(Pennebaker & Francis, 1999) The emotion cat-

egories include negative-emotion words (sad, angry) and positive-emotion words (happy, laugh), and the cognitive categories include causal (because, reason) and insight words (un- derstand, realize) The two cognitive categories

were designed to capture the degree to whichparticipants were actively thinking in their writ-ing, attempting to put together causes and rea-sons for the events and emotions they were de-scribing LIWC, in turn, produces a probabilisticrating for each linguistic category

Thus, we reanalyzed six studies: two in whichcollege students wrote about traumas whereblood immune measures were collected; two inwhich first-year college students wrote abouttheir deepest thoughts and feelings about com-ing to college; one study of maximum-securityprisoners in a state penitentiary; and one usingprofessionals who unexpectedly had been laidoff from their jobs after over 20 years of em-ployment (Pennebaker, Mayne, & Francis,

1997) In these efforts, we uncovered two

im-portant findings The more that people used

positive-emotion words, the more their health

improved Individuals who used a moderate

number of negative-emotion words in their

writing about upsetting topics evidenced the

greatest drops in physician visits in the months

after the study Those people who used a very

high rate of negative-emotion words and those

who used very few were the most likely to have

continuing health problems after participating

in the study

From a statistical perspective, the cognitive

categories accounted for the most variance in

predicting improvements in health Specifically,

people whose health improved the most used an

increasing amount of causal and insight words

over the 3- to 5-day course of the experiment

It was clear that participants demonstrating this

pattern of language were constructing, over

time, a story that was replete with causal

im-plications Stories were built on the foundation

of causal links surrounding participants’

expe-riences and feelings Constructing this narrative

appeared critical in reaching an understanding

and achieving better health Indeed, those

par-ticipants who began the study with a coherent

story that explained some past event did not

benefit from writing; merely having a story is

not sufficient to assure good health The process

of constructing a story is crucial

Similarly, Clark (1993) asserts in her work on

conversation and language that in order to

convey a story, the speech act must be

coher-ent Linguistic coherence subsumes several

characteristics, including structure, use of causal

explanation, repetition of themes, and an

appre-ciation of the listener’s perspective

Construct-ing a coherent story resembles what many

psychologists in the coping literature refer

to as “working through” a problem As a result

of working through loss, an individual is

thought to achieve resolution by accepting the

loss intellectually Indeed, the increased use of

causal and insight words detected in our

lin-guistic analyses provides good support for this

process

An inherent benefit of forming a narrative

involves being able to translate one’s life story

into a language that is both understandable and

communicable Once constructed, this story not

only helps the beholder to better understand

himself and the causes of his trauma but also

allows him to communicate it to others Not

being able to tell anyone, or the unwillingness

to be open and honest about significant tional upheaval disconnects a person from hissocial world The sharing of one’s story leads us

emo-to the third proposed mechanism by whichthese benefits come about: social communica-tion

Social ProcessesTraumatic events are socially isolating Implicit

in this statement is that by talking to others (orwriting) about traumatic experiences, trauma-tized individuals can establish richer social con-nections to their social networks The impor-tance of human communication in mentalhealth is of primary importance Social supporthas been associated with mental and physicalhealth, with speedier recovery from illness, andwith the likelihood of remaining healthy whenstressors occur (cf Holahan et al., 1996) Indeed,social relationships especially protect individualsfrom ill health under periods of high stress

It is important to maintain social connectionsbecause social groups offer a venue for growth,social experimentation, and change Sharing ourstory alerts our friends to our emotional andpsychological state In contrast, keeping a secretengenders a social chasm between the secret-keepers and their friends Keeping a secret is acognitively consuming load that prevents thesecret-keeper from being a good listener andthereby exacerbates the social disconnection

In a recent study of mutual support, both line and face-to-face, we found that social sup-port groups are a significant way by which peo-ple change their health behavior (Davison,Pennebaker, & Dickerson, 2000) With the on-set of an illness or a traumatic experience comesanxiety and uncertainty The resulting intenseemotions of an afflicted individual can be re-duced through interpersonal exchange Groups

on-of others with similar concerns or conditionsprovide a standard of normalcy against whichpeople can compare themselves, as well as toshare their thoughts and feelings surroundingtheir conditions

In our most recent studies, we are gating whether writing could facilitate social in-tegration, specifically, whether one of the healthbenefits of writing enables individuals to betterconnect with their social group Do people begin

investi-to interact differently with others, or perhapssee themselves in a new light, after writingabout an emotional topic? In order to explorethese ideas, we have attempted to capture how

people naturally talk and interact with others by

developing an Electronically Activated Recorder

(EAR)—a simple tape recorder with an attached

computer chip that records for 30 seconds every

12 minutes The EAR is lightweight and

non-intrusive, worn by participants like a walkman

for 2 consecutive days A small external

micro-phone allows us to hear pieces of conversations,

as well as determine where participants are and

what they are doing (Mehl, Pennebaker, Crow,

& Dabbs, 2000)

In the first study, participants wore the EAR

for 2 consecutive days, 2 weeks prior to

partic-ipating in a routine writing study and again 2

weeks afterward Transcriptions of the

conver-sations yielded promising results in terms of

participants’ physical behaviors, as well as their

language as analyzed by LIWC As compared

with participants in the control condition, who

were asked to write about time management,

trauma-writers began talking to their friends

more, laughing more, and using significantly

more positive emotions in their daily language

Trauma-writers also demonstrated significant

drops in their resting levels of both diastolic and

systolic blood pressure Similarly, writing about

emotion appears to have encouraged

partici-pants to use more present-tense words and

fewer past-tense words Interestingly, these

ef-fects were far stronger for men, who are

natu-rally less socially integrated than women

Currently we are investigating some of the

likely linguistic components of social

integra-tion that we refer to as synchrony Whereas

other authors have conceptualized social

inte-gration from a self-report perspective, as a sense

of belonging, cohesion, confidence, and security

with others (Bille-Brahe, 1996), we are defining

social integration as a synchrony in behaviors,

beliefs, and language within a social group

From a subjective perspective, synchrony

among members of a dyad may be perceived as

a “click” or feeling “in synch”: having a

con-versation that is comfortable and fluid

Linguis-tically, we expect that synchrony will be

por-trayed by similar patterns in the way people

talk across LIWC word categories—for example,

coordination in the number and types of words

used within a dyad Psychologists have

dem-onstrated that synchrony (albeit among

behav-iors) communicates interest and approval

(Ken-don, 1970); thus, we are exploring whether a

synchronized pattern of language can facilitate

social integration

Guiding our research is the idea that a

lin-guistically synchronized interaction is an

indi-cator of effective communication between bers Researchers examining interpersonalinteractions have found that when people com-municate, they will mimic one another’s bodylanguage and synchronize the timing of theirbehaviors (Burgoon, Stern, & Dillman, 1995)

mem-In studies of emotional contagion, researchershave indicated that when people are in conver-sation, they automatically and continuouslymimic and synchronize their movements withthe facial expressions, voices, postures, move-ments, and instrumental behaviors of others(Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1994) In theirpioneering work on synchrony, Condon andOgston (1966) concluded that synchrony was afundamental, universal characteristic of humancommunication

We believe that synchrony in language mayfacilitate connections and social bonds betweenconversational members, thereby facilitating so-cial integration The flip side of the coin, an in-ability to have synchronized interactions,should dispose one to a life of seclusion: theantithesis of social integration This idea is re-lated to the inhibition paradigm, as describedearlier, in that an inability to communicate withothers engenders hidden parts of the self, pos-sibly due to a fear of not being understood oraccepted by others As we see from the study

by Davison et al (2000), connection bringsabout beneficial health outcomes

An important dimension to coping with sors is the degree to which people discuss orconfront traumas after their occurrence (Pen-nebaker, 1997) We propose that our paradigmfacilitates confession by first enabling people topersonally understand their trauma and ulti-mately to allow them to discuss it with others,thereby becoming socially integrated In turn,social integration is an integral component ofphysical and psychological health Althoughpsychological health remains an ambiguous,sometimes illusory construct in psychology, ourmethod of constructing and sharing one’s storyoffers a way to reduce the physiological effects

stres-of a massive life stressor, as well as to gain trol, find meaning, and facilitate social integra-tion

con-Individual Differences

Do some people benefit more from writing thanothers? In the first 15 years of the writing par-adigm, no researcher was able to demonstrateconsistently that one individual difference was

linked to health The problem may have been

that health measures, such as physician visits,

are notoriously variable With such unstable

de-pendent measures, it is exceptionally difficult to

detect individual differences that are correlated

with within-condition effects

In recent years, some promising findings

have begun to be reported In Smyth’s (1998)

meta-analysis of 14 writing studies, men tended

to benefit more from writing than did women

Christensen and Smith (1993) reported that

in-dividuals high in hostility evidenced greater

im-mune response to writing than those persons

who were low in hostility Most recently, Paez,

Velasco, and Gonzalez (1999) found that people

who were high in the trait of alexithymia (a

condition characterized by the inability to

de-tect, interpret, or label emotions) benefited

more from writing than did those low in the

trait The common thread of all these studies is

that people who are not naturally emotionally

open or likely to talk with others about feelings

may be the very people who benefit most from

writing about their internal states

Recently individual differences in story

mak-ing and narrative construction have been

ex-plored Smyth, True, and Souto (2001)

evalu-ated the role of narrative structuring by

experimental manipulation and found that the

self-reported health of people who wrote about

a traumatic experience in a narrative fashion

was better than for those who wrote about this

topic in a disjointed, listlike way

Unfortu-nately, this may reflect the general task of

writ-ing more than a specific ability to write good

stories In a recent study, Graybeal, Seagal, and

Pennebaker (in press) tried to evaluate if a

per-son who was a good “story maker” in writing

about traumas also was a good story maker in

response to Thematic Apperception Test card or

an inkblot test There was virtually no

relation-ship Although the ability to construct a good

narrative about one’s own trauma apparently is

beneficial, there does seem to be a group of very

healthy story makers in the world who are

ac-counting for all of our variance

Conclusions

Emotional upheavals can have a variety of

ad-verse effects on people’s mental and physical

health They make us think differently about

life, our friends, and ourselves They also have

the potential to profoundly disrupt our ongoing

relationships with others As many researchers

have begun to discover, disclosure—throughwriting or talking—has a remarkable potential

in alleviating these effects Putting upsetting periences into words allows people to stop in-hibiting their thoughts and feelings, to begin toorganize their thoughts and perhaps find mean-ing in their traumas, and to reintegrate intotheir social networks

ex-Writing is not a panacea Not everyone efits from writing We suspect that it has thepotential to disrupt people’s lives As an ex-ample, a recent writing participant told us that,after writing, she reevaluated her life and hermarriage She then divorced her husband of 8years and was forced to move with her children

ben-to a much smaller apartment Although she ports being happier and healthier because of thewriting, some might argue that writing hadsome very negative side effects

re-It is somewhat ironic that the writing digm is discussed as a feature of positive psy-chology Although we have demonstrated thatwriting about traumatic experiences can havesignificant health benefits, in a sense, our par-adigm encourages participants to dwell on themisery in their lives We are essentially bring-ing inhibited or secret negative emotions to theforefront This can be an anxiety-provoking ex-perience; recall that many participants in the ex-perimental condition cry and report feelinggreater sadness, depression, frustration, andguilt in the short run (Pennebaker, 1989) Infact, emotional state after writing depends onhow participants are feeling prior to writingsuch that the better they feel before, the worsethey feel afterward

para-Is this distress necessary for the positive comes we witness in participants’ health? If theachievement of insight is truly responsible forthe benefits we have demonstrated, is emotionalexpression—when it appears to be the exact op-posite of uplifting—a necessary component? In-tuitively, participants’ reports of distress seemantithetical to their reports of the value andmeaningfulness they ascribe to participating inour experiments Instead, it appears that theyacknowledge the importance of distress as aprelude to overcoming trauma

out-We have presented the writing paradigm as a

process toward achieving mental health We

emphasize the importance of process in order toprevent the notion that one can automaticallyachieve health benefits Clearly, one might have

to endure some negativity to be healthy ety has an obsessive focus on strategies aimedtoward reducing the awareness of unpleasant

Soci-emotions Focus on negative emotions,

how-ever, may be necessary in order to genuinely

overcome trauma and grow as a mentally

healthy human being

One cannot ascribe too much importance to

positivity by neglecting what appears to be a

necessary psychological cost At the risk of

sounding trite, we note that our research

find-ings highlight the importance of being true to

oneself—confronting negative thoughts and

ac-knowledging negative emotions The path to a

satisfying and fulfilling life does not bypass

dif-ficulties and negative thoughts and feelings

In-deed, one of the goals in positive psychology is

to increase our understanding and abilities to

transverse those impediments more effectively

Thus, by openly facing our traumas, we no

longer end up in such psychological ditches

Rather, we can begin to build bridges to the

considerable strengths that we all possess As

such, the psychological road that heretofore has

been less traveled may become a main

thor-oughfare of positive psychology

Acknowledgment Preparation of this

manu-script was aided by a grant from the National

Institute of Mental Health (MH52391)

References

Bille-Brahe, U (1996) Measuring social

integra-tion and social support Nordic Journal of

Psy-chiatry, 50, 41–46.

Burgoon, J., Stern, L., & Dillman, L (1995)

Inter-personal adaptation: Dyadic interaction

pat-terns New York: Cambridge University Press.

Christensen, A J., & Smith, T W (1993) Cynical

hostility and cardiovascular reactivity during

self-disclosure Psychosomatic Medicine, 55,

193–202

*Clark, L F (1993) Stress and the

cognitive-conversational benefits of social interaction

Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 12,

25–55

Condon, W S., & Ogston, W D (1966) Sound

film analysis of normal and pathological

behav-ior patterns Journal of Nervous and Mental

Disease, 143, 338–347.

*Davison, K P., Pennebaker, J W., & Dickerson,

S S (2000) Who talks? The social psychology

of illness support groups American

Psycholo-gist, 55, 205–217.

Durkheim, E (1951) Suicide New York: Free

Press

Freud, S (1958) Remembering, repeating and

working through In J Strachey (Ed.), The

stan-dard edition of the complete works of Sigmund Freud (Vol 12) London: Hogarth (Original

work published 1914)Gergen, K J., & Gergen, M M (1988) Narrativeand the self as relationship In L Berkowitz

(Ed.), Advances in experimental social

psychol-ogy (Vol 21, pp 17–56) New York: Academic

confrontation approach Journal of Personality

and Social Psychology, 71, 588–602.

Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J T., & Rapson, R (1994)

Emotional contagion Cambridge, England:

Cambridge University Press

Helson, H (1925) The psychology of Gestalt

American Journal of Psychology, 36, 494–526.

Holahan, C J., Moos, R H., Holahan, C K., &Brennan, P L (1996) Social support, copingstrategies, and psychosocial adjustment to car-diac illness: Implications for assessment and pre-

vention Journal of Prevention and Intervention

in the Community, 13, 33–52.

Jourard, S M (1971) Self-disclosure: An

experi-mental analysis of the transparent self New

York: Wiley-Interscience

Kelly, A E (2001) Dealing with secrets In C R

Snyder (Ed.), Coping with stress: Effective

peo-ple and processes (pp 196–221) New York:

Ox-ford University Press

Kendon, A (1970) Movement coordination in

so-cial interaction: Some examples described Acta

Psychologica, Amsterdam, 32(2), 101–125.

Krantz, A., & Pennebaker, J W (1997) Bodily

versus written expression of traumatic ence Unpublished manuscript.

experi-Martin, L L., & Tesser, A (1989) Toward a tivational and structural theory of ruminativethought In J S Uleman, J A Bargh et al

mo-(Eds.), Unintended thought (pp 306–326) New

*Mehl, M., Pennebaker, J W., Crow, D M., &

Dabbs, J (2000) The Electronically-Activated

Recorder (EAR): A device for sampling ralistic daily activities and conversations Man-

natu-uscript submitted for publication

Mumford, E., Schlesinger, H J., Glass, G V.,

Pat-rick, C., & Cuerdon, T (1998) A new look at

evidence about reduced cost of medical

utiliza-tion following mental health treatment Journal

of Psychotherapy Practice and Research, 7, 68–

86

Neimeyer, R A., & Stewart, A E (2000)

Con-structivist and narrative psychotherapies In

C R Snyder & R E Ingram (Eds.), Handbook

of psychological change: Psychotherapy

pro-cesses and practices for the 21st century

(pp 337–357) New York: Wiley

Paez, D., Velasco, C., & Gonzalez, J L (1999)

Ex-pressive writing and the role of alexithymia as

a dispositional deficit in self-disclosure and

psy-chological health Journal of Personality and

So-cial Psychology, 77, 630–641.

*Pennebaker, J W (1989) Confession, inhibition,

and disease In L Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in

experimental social psychology (Vol 22,

pp 211–244) New York: Academic Press

*Pennebaker, J W (1997) Opening up: The

heal-ing power of expressheal-ing emotions (Rev ed.).

New York: Guilford

Pennebaker, J W., & Francis, M E (1999)

Lin-guistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC): A

computer-based text analysis program

Mah-wah, NJ: Erlbaum

Pennebaker, J W., Kiecolt-Glaser, J., & Glaser, R

(1988) Disclosure of traumas and immune

func-tion: Health implications for psychotherapy

Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology,

56, 239–245.

*Pennebaker, J W., Mayne, T J., & Francis, M E

(1997) Linguistic predictors of adaptive

be-reavement Journal of Personality and Social

Psychology, 72, 863–871.

Petrie, K P., Booth, R J., & Pennebaker, J W

(1998) The immunological effects of thought

suppression Journal of Personality and Social

Psychology, 75, 1264–1272.

Rime´, B (1995) Mental rumination, social ing, and the recovery from emotional exposure

shar-In J W Pennebaker (Ed.), Emotion, disclosure,

and health (pp 271–291) Washington, DC:

American Psychological Association

Salovey, P., Rothman, A J., & Rodin, J (1998).Health behavior In D Gilbert, S Fiske, & G

Lindzey (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology

(Vol 2, 4th ed., pp 633–683) Boston: Hill

McGraw-Smyth, J M (1998) Written emotional sion: Effect sizes, outcome types, and moderat-

expres-ing variables Journal of Consultexpres-ing and Clinical

Psychology, 66, 174–184.

*Smyth, J M., True, N., & Souto, J (2001) fects of writing about traumatic experiences:

Ef-The necessity for narrative structuring Journal

of Social and Clinical Psychology, 20, 161–

Wegner, D M (1994) Ironic processes of mental

control Psychological Review, 101, 34–52.

Wegner, D M., Lane, J D., & Dimitri, S (1994)

The allure of secret relationships Journal

of Personality and Social Psychology, 66, 287–

300

Wortman, C B., & Silver, R C (1989) The myths

of coping with loss Journal of Consulting and

Clinical Psychology, 57, 349–357.

Zeigarnik, B (1938) On finished and unfinished

tasks In W D Ellis (Ed.), A source book of

Ge-stalt psychology (pp 300–314) London:

Rout-ledge and Kegan Paul (Original work published1927)

42

Benefit-Finding and Benefit-Reminding

Howard Tennen & Glenn Affleck

Individuals facing adversity frequently report

benefits in their negative experiences (Affleck &

Tennen, 1996) Benefit-finding has been linked

to psychological and physical health, and it

plays a prominent role in theories of cognitive

adaptation to threatening circumstances

(Janoff-Bulman, 1992; Taylor, 1983), posttraumatic

growth (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1995), and

psy-chological thriving (Epel, McEwen, & Ickovics,

1998) Snyder and McCullough (2000) refer to

benefit-finding as a human strength, and they

urge its inclusion in the emerging positive

psy-chology paradigm Yet the empirical literature

in this area is a long way from fulfilling its

promise Problems include the tenuous

concep-tual status of benefit-finding, along with an

ex-cessive reliance on cross-sectional designs and

measures of negative psychological states

Be-cause of these difficulties, we believe that the

potential of benefit-finding for the positive

psy-chology movement has been compromised In

this chapter we summarize the prevalence of

benefit-finding and describe what is known

about the related emotional and health

advan-tages We then briefly examine key assumptions

about benefit-finding and offer several

yet-to-be-tested alternatives to the dominant

concep-tualization of benefit-finding as a form of

cog-nitive adaptation Finally, we propose directions

for future research and consider the tions of this area of inquiry for positive psy-chology Readers interested in how benefit-finding is related to positive personalitycharacteristics such as optimism, extraversion,and hope will find detailed treatments elsewhere(Affleck & Tennen, 1996; Tedeschi & Calhoun,1995; Tennen & Affleck, 1999)

implica-Cross-Sectional Studies of Benefit-Finding

Researchers on the topic of benefit-finding, ilar to other investigators in the broader per-sonality and social psychology fields, relyexcessively on cross-sectional correlational de-signs We examined 20 studies in which theconcurrent association between benefit-findingand well-being was a focus The majority ofparticipants in these studies endorsed at leastsome benefit in diverse threatening circum-stances, including invasive medical treatment,life-threatening illness, chronic disability, HIVinfection, rape, sexual abuse, accident, and nat-ural disaster Fourteen of the 20 studies estab-lished that benefit-finding was associated withbetter adjustment, 1 study found that benefit-finding was associated with poorer adjustment,

sim-and 5 studies reported no reliable association.

We found no clear differences in the

popula-tions studied, the sample size, or the

measure-ment of benefits or adjustmeasure-ment that adequately

explain the observed variation across studies A

major limitation of this body of work for

in-vestigators interested in positive psychology,

however, is its primary focus on indicators of

maladjustment and distress But the focus on

maladaptation also is conceptually limiting

be-cause benefit-finding is now considered a

pri-mary appraisal tied to positively toned emotions

(Lazarus, 1999) And, of course, one cannot

dis-entangle temporal precedence in these

cross-sectional studies It may be that those who are

better adjusted find it easier to construe positive

aspects of a negative experience Thus, we turn

our attention to longitudinal investigations

Longitudinal Studies of Benefit-Finding

We located six longitudinal studies and two

“microlongitudinal” (i.e., daily process) studies

of the predictive significance of benefit-finding

Excluded are the few longitudinal studies with

foci on the psychological benefits of more global

constructs such as “positive reappraisal” (Leana,

Feldman, & Tan, 1998); “finding meaning”

(McIntosh, Silver, & Wortman, 1993) and

“pos-itive meaning” (Folkman, Chesney, Collette,

Boccellari, & Cooke, 1996; Park & Folkman,

1997); and several intervention studies, which

we will describe at the conclusion of this

chap-ter Because these eight studies provide our only

window to the temporal dynamics of

benefit-finding and adaptation, and provide a unique

opportunity to examine whether benefit-finding

anticipates psychological and health outcomes

or is simply a correlate of emotional and

phys-ical well-being, we describe them in some detail

Victims of Fire

In the first published longitudinal study of

find-ing benefits in adversity, Thompson (1985)

sur-veyed individuals whose apartments had been

partially or completely destroyed by fire

Al-though the sample was small, and Thompson

combined benefit-finding with cognitive

adap-tations such as imagining worse situations and

making social comparisons, this study provided

the first evidence that benefit-finding might

predict later negative mood, pleasure in daily

activities, and physical symptoms Two thirds of

the sample reported finding some benefit in theexperience, most commonly citing others’ help-fulness and important life lessons AlthoughThompson did not examine whether benefit-finding per se predicted changes in well-being,she found that the composite indicator of cog-nitive adaptation 1 to 2 weeks after the fire pre-dicted well-being a year later The long-termcorrelates unique to benefit-finding remained to

be discovered In several subsequent studies, thespecific foci were the adaptational benefits ofbenefit-finding

Bereaved IndividualsThe loss of a loved one places an individual atincreased risk for psychological and physicalmorbidity Yet the variability in emotional andhealth outcomes makes bereavement a fertilearena in which to study how benefit-finding in-fluences subsequent psychological adjustment.Davis, Nolen-Hoeksema, and Larson (1998)took advantage of this variability in a prospec-tive study of individuals whose parent, spouse,partner, child, or sibling was in hospice care Aspart of a structured interview 6 months follow-ing the loss, participants were asked if they hadfound anything positive in the experience ofhaving lost a loved one Seventy-three percentreported that they had found something posi-tive in the experience, and their specific re-sponses were consistent with those reported inprevious cross-sectional studies of benefit-finding, including personal growth, new lifeperspective, strengthening family bonds, andsupport from others

Davis et al (1998) examined whether finding

a benefit 6 months following the loss predicteddistress 7 months later Although this analysisdid not control for distress at 6 months follow-ing the loss, it did control for distress prior tothe loss, as well as the extent to which partici-pants had made sense of the loss (i.e., foundmeaning) at the 6-month interview Remarka-bly, Davis et al found that benefit-findinguniquely predicted 13-month distress, even af-ter controlling for the extent to which the loss

“made sense.” These investigators also foundthat it was not the number of benefits that held

predictive value but rather whether any benefit

was endorsed Thus, whatever psychologicalfunction was served by finding benefits, itseemed to be served adequately once any benefitwas found This observation has implicationsfor how we measure benefit-finding, whether

multi-item scales are required, and whether we

should expect indicators of benefit-finding to

meet traditional psychometric criteria for

inter-nal consistency We will return to these issues

at the conclusion of this chapter

Mothers of Acutely Ill Newborns

In their study of mothers whose infants were

in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU),

Af-fleck, Tennen, and Rowe (1991) asked their

par-ticipants whether they had found any benefits

from their child’s hazardous delivery and

hos-pitalization Seventy-five percent of these

mothers cited at least one benefit, including

im-proved relationships with family and friends,

the importance of keeping life’s problems in

perspective, increased empathy, positive

changes in their personality, and the certainty

that their child was now even more precious to

them Mothers who cited benefits during their

infant’s hospitalization reported brighter mood

and less distress 6 and 18 months later, even

when their mood during the initial interview

was statistically controlled This ability of

benefit-finding to predict later emotional

well-being also was independent of an objective

se-verity index of the child’s medical problems

Thus, benefit-finding appears to anticipate

emo-tional well-being and is not confounded by

ob-jective measures of the severity of the problem

A unique result of this study was that

benefit-finding predicted not only mothers’ own

well-being but also their child’s developmental

test scores 18 months later The relationship

re-mained significant even after controlling for

mothers’ predischarge mood, age, education,

and parity and the severity of infants’ perinatal

medical problems This discovery is critical

be-cause it extends the positive outcomes of

benefit-finding beyond the realm of self-report

and psychological well-being Although it is

tempting to speculate about the mechanisms

through which perceived benefits during their

infants’ hospitalization were associated with

later developmental outcomes, no clues as to the

mediating processes are provided in the study

Men Who Experienced a First Heart Attack

Another demonstration that objective health

outcomes can be predicted from earlier

benefit-finding comes from a long-term study of men

who survived a first heart attack (Affleck,

Ten-nen, Croog, & Levine, 1987) Seven weeks after

their initial heart attack, 58% of these men citedbenefits, including anticipated changes in life-style, increased enjoyment, valued lessonsabout the importance of health behavior, andpositive changes in their values and life philos-ophies Eight years later (and controlling forage, socioeconomic status, and the severity ofthe initial attack), those men who had reportedbenefits were in better cardiac health and wereless likely to have suffered another attack

As in the aforementioned study of mothers

of NICU infants, few clues in this investigationwere provided regarding the processes throughwhich benefit-finding buffered these men fromthe recurrence of a heart attack It is tempting

to argue that benefit-finding predicted ity because those who referred to anticipatedlifestyle and health behavior changes actuallymade such changes, which in turn produced su-perior cardiac health (Affleck & Tennen, 1996;Tennen & Affleck, 1999) But as anyone whohas worked in a cardiac rehabilitation service, orhas tried to stop smoking or maintain a weightloss diet, will attest, the road from appreciatingthe benefits of health behavior to cardiac health

morbid-8 years later is fraught with motivational andinterpersonal impediments Moreover, Davis etal.’s (1998) discovery that one particular benefit

is less consequential than finding any benefit(cf Affleck et al., 1991) calls into question thenotion that health behavior changes mediatedthe effect of benefit-finding on reinfarction orcardiac health Although some evidence ofphysiological mediation is beginning to emerge(see Bower, Kemeny, Taylor, & Fahey, 1998),

we remain a long way from understanding themechanisms through which benefit-finding pre-dicts health outcomes

Disaster VictimsThe three longitudinal studies described thus farinvolved men and women who had experiencedthe loss of a loved one, mothers who were deal-ing with their newborn infants’ threateningmedical situation, and men who were recoveringfrom their first heart attacks Although each ofthese contexts is unique, what they share is thateither the respondents themselves (Affleck etal., 1987) or a close relative (Affleck et al., 1991;Davis et al., 1998) was facing a serious medicalcondition McMillen, Smith, and Fisher (1997)extended this line of inquiry in their longitu-dinal study of people who had experienced one

of three disasters involving extensive property

damage and loss of life: a severe tornado; a plane

crashing into a hotel lobby, or a mass shooting

Survivors of these three disasters were

inter-viewed 4 to 6 weeks after the incident and again

3 years later The interview included a question

asking whether anything positive had come

from the incident As in other studies of

benefit-finding, most participants’ responses could be

categorized as reflecting personal growth or

in-creased closeness with others

McMillen et al (1997) also measured mental

health status and characteristics of the disaster

Through a structured diagnostic interview, they

assessed current and lifetime major depression,

generalized anxiety disorder, alcohol

abuse-dependence and posttraumatic stress disorder

(PTSD) Because diagnostic incidence rates at

the 3-year follow-up were not sufficiently high

to serve as dependent variables, the

investiga-tors focused on the current diagnosis of PTSD

and the change in number of diagnoses from the

4- to 6-week to the 3-year interview Four

char-acteristics of the disaster also were assessed in

the initial interview: whether respondents

thought they were going to die during the

dis-aster; whether they were injured, whether they

knew anyone who died during the disaster, and

whether they saw or did anything they found

disgusting during or immediately after the

dis-aster Scores on these four disaster

characteris-tics were summed to create a severity of

expo-sure index

Although perceived benefits were reported by

a majority of individuals across the three

disas-ters, there was considerable variation across

dis-aster sites Fifty-five percent of those involved in

the plane crash reported some kind of benefit,

compared with 76% of those involved in the

shooting and 90% of those who survived the

tor-nado As in the longitudinal studies of bereaved

individuals, mothers of NICU infants, and heart

attack victims, participants who reported benefits

soon after experiencing one of these adverse

events were less likely to evidence extreme

dis-tress (PTSD) 3 years later Whether the benefit

was personal growth or increased closeness had

no bearing on subsequent diagnosis This

asso-ciation between perceiving no benefits and a later

PTSD diagnosis is particularly impressive

be-cause it controlled for injury during the disaster,

gender, and the number of preincident

diagno-ses, each of which also made a unique

contribu-tion to the prediccontribu-tion of PTSD Equally

impres-sive is that perceived benefit moderated the effect

of severity of exposure on mental health change

Participants with high exposure who perceivedsome benefit had the greatest recovery (i.e.,change in number of diagnoses), whereas thosewith high exposure who did not perceive benefithad the least recovery

Bereaved HIV-Seropositive Men

In the four longitudinal studies described thusfar, benefit-finding predicted subsequent psy-chological distress, psychiatric diagnoses, orone’s own or a loved one’s physical morbidity.Yet, as we mentioned in relation to Affleck etal.’s (1987) study of heart attack victims, theseinvestigations were not designed to examine themediators of these prospective relationships In

a recent study of AIDS-related mortality amongbereaved HIV-seropositive men, Bower et al.(1998) examined both physiological and behav-ioral mediators They conducted a semistruc-tured interview on average 8 months after theseseropositive participants had lost a close friend

or partner to AIDS Perhaps because Bower et

al (1998) were interested specifically in majorshifts in values, priorities, or perspectives in re-sponse to the loss, they found a somewhat lowerincidence of benefit-finding (40%) than was re-ported in other studies of benefit-finding Yetrespondents’ specific interview responses paral-leled those offered by participants in the studiesdescribed previously: greater appreciation forloved ones, a perception of life as precious, in-creased self-understanding, and enhanced inter-personal functioning

Every 6 months participants were examinedfor signs and symptoms of AIDS and were in-terviewed regarding their health behaviors, in-cluding their use of AZT, recreational drugs,and alcohol in the past 6 months, and their sex-ual practices, exercise, and sleep patterns Ateach 6-month visit, HIV progression was as-sessed via levels of CD4 T lymphocytes AIDS-related mortality was determined through deathcertificates

Bower et al (1998) found that finding, which they referred to as “the discov-ery of meaning,” anticipated CD4 T lymphocytedecline This relationship was retained aftercontrolling for the extent to which participantswere engaged in deliberate, effortful, or long-lasting thinking about the death of their friend

benefit-or partner Mbenefit-oreover, benefit-finding was sociated with a lower rate of AIDS-related mor-tality over the next 4 to 9 years Neither ofthese associations was mediated by the health

as-behaviors measured, but the prospective

rela-tionship between benefit-finding and mortality

was fully mediated by CD4 slope, that is, the

lower rate of AIDS-related mortality among

those who had reported benefits was due to

their less rapid decline in CD4 lymphocytes

Based on this pattern of findings, those

individ-uals faced with a major loss who emphasize

close relationships and personal growth appear

to have physiological benefits and a lower rate

of mortality But whether benefit-finding

pro-duces better functioning in the everyday lives

of chronically ill individuals, and whether they

can derive such enhanced functioning from

active efforts to construct benefits or gains

re-main unclear from longer term longitudinal

studies In our daily process studies of

individ-uals with chronic pain, described subsequently,

we examined the day-to-day benefits of

benefit-finding and sharpened the distinction between

benefit-finding and intentional

benefit-reminding (Affleck & Tennen, 1996; Tennen &

Affleck, 1999)

Rheumatoid Arthritis Patients

In a study of individuals experiencing chronic

pain, we (Tennen, Affleck, Urrows, Higgins, &

Mendola, 1992) assessed benefit-finding among

rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients before they

completed a diary of daily pain, mood and

pain-related activity limitations each evening

for 75 days Benefit-finding in this study was

assessed with an internally consistent five-item

scale in which participants rated potential

ben-efits associated with RA (e.g., “Dealing with

my pain has made me a stronger person”)

We found that perceived benefits moderated

the relationship between pain severity and

ac-tivity limitations That is, with increased levels

of daily pain, individuals who had endorsed

more benefits from their illness at the start of

the study went on to report fewer days on

which their activities were limited by their

pain

Benefit-Finding, Benefit-Reminding, and

Everyday Life With Chronic Pain

In the findings described thus far, individuals

who perceived personal benefits from the major

loss, illness, or disaster they experienced were

more likely to show long-term health benefits,

decreased morbidity and mortality, and less

functional impairment day to day Despite theintuitive appeal and consistency of thesefindings across situations and indicators ofhealth and psychological well-being, we cannot

make inferences about whether deliberately

thinking about benefits or gains provided thepsychological and health benefits In our study

of women with fibromyalgia (Affleck & nen, 1996; Tennen & Affleck, 1999), a chronicpain syndrome with unknown etiology, we ex-amined the deliberate daily use of benefit cog-

Ten-nitions, which we called benefit-reminding, and

used a self-monitoring methodology to mine how benefit-reminding unfolds day today

deter-The time-intensive self-monitoring ology used in this study involved a combina-tion of a nightly structured diary with a com-puter-assisted “real-time” assessment of painintensity and mood several times each day.One item on the nightly questionnaire askedparticipants to describe how much that daythey had reminded themselves of some of thebenefits that have come from living with theirchronic pain The average respondent re-ported benefit-reminding on 24 of the 30 studydays, although 33 of our 89 participants neverreminded themselves of benefits Some whohad cited many benefits on an initial ques-tionnaire never reminded themselves of thesebenefits during the subsequent month of dailyrecording On the other hand, some whohad cited only one benefit on the question-naire also reported benefit-reminding on manydays

method-The design of our study enabled a person analysis of day-to-day differences inbenefit-reminding with day-to-day variation inpain and mood On this point, we discoveredthat days characterized by more benefit-reminding did not differ in pain intensity,but they were accompanied by improved mood—specifically, increased levels of pleasant,aroused, and aroused-pleasant (i.e., peppy,stimulated) mood When all three of thesemood dimension scores were examined to-gether as correlates of benefit-reminding fre-quency, there remained a unique relation withpleasant mood Thus, on days when thesechronic pain sufferers made greater efforts toremind themselves of the benefits that havecome from their illness, they were especiallymore likely to experience pleasurable mood,regardless of their pain intensity on thesedays

within-The “Assumptive World” of within-Theory and

Research on Benefit-Finding

From our overview of the literature,

benefit-finding appears to be common among

individ-uals facing a myriad of threatening events, and

it predicts emotional and physical adaptation

months and even years later Yet much of what

we have learned about the adaptational

advan-tages of benefit-finding has been framed in the

traditional language of psychological inquiry—

emotional symptom reduction, fewer

psychiat-ric syndromes, a reduced risk for adverse

med-ical outcomes, and decreased mortality With

some exceptions (e.g., Affleck & Tennen, 1996;

Davis et al., 1998), studies have not examined

positive psychological functioning Thus,

inves-tigators approaching the phenomenon of

benefit-finding from a positive psychology

per-spective have much to offer

It would be unfortunate, however, if

propo-nents of positive psychology now entered the

breach armed with countless new outcome

in-dicators but absent guiding conceptual

frame-works More than anything else, benefit-finding

needs a conceptual home The original

assumption among theorists was that victims’

reports of benefits or gains were a form of

de-nial or a maladaptive reality distortion This

as-sumption has been supplanted in current

theo-retical formulations by three other assumptions

reflecting the view that benefit-finding (a) is a

selective appraisal, (b) is a coping strategy, and

(c) emerges only later in the process of

adjust-ing to adversity We now examine each of these

suppositions, which like the “assumptive world”

(Janoff-Bulman, 1992) of our research

partici-pants, has persisted in the absence of empirical

support Our goal is to provide a cautioning

voice so as to avoid incorrectly reifying these

assumptions in the lore of positive psychology

should it continue to embrace the construct of

benefit-finding

Benefit-Finding Is a Selective Evaluation

Benefit-finding is typically viewed as a

“selec-tive evaluation” (Taylor, Wood, & Lichtman,

1983) According to Taylor et al “Selective

evaluation processes minimize victimization by

focusing on beneficial qualities of the

situa-tion” (p 26) Other selective evaluations include

finding a sense of order and purpose in the

threatening experience, imagining “worse

worlds,” and making comparisons with less

for-tunate others These selective appraisals are sumed to help individuals restore valuedassumptions and cherished beliefs about them-selves as worthy and relatively invulnerable andtheir world as orderly, predictable, meaningful,and benevolent or at least benign

as-Implied in this constructivist interpretation of

benefit-finding is that it is the appraisal of

ben-efits that helps people adapt to victimization.Yet when individuals identify greater familyharmony as an unexpected benefit of a crisis,might the adaptational benefits associated withthis appraisal be due to their improved ability

to obtain social support? Might someone whoknows a disaster victim well agree with his orher appraisal of positive personality change? If

so, the inferred cognitive adaptation may be anepiphenomenon, of interest only as a marker of

an influential change that has occurred We turn to this possibility in our discussion ofstress-related growth

re-Benefit-Finding Is a Coping StrategyFinding benefits in threatening circumstancesalso has been construed as a coping strategy bymany investigators and theorists (cf Tedeschi,Park, & Calhoun, 1998) Despite Lazarus andFolkman’s (1984) care to focus on the effortfuland strategic nature of coping, they includedperceived benefits as an indicator of emotion-focused coping The Ways of Coping Scale(Folkman & Lazarus, 1988), for example, in-

cludes the following items: changed or grew as

a person in a good way; came out of the perience better than when I went in; found new faith; and discovered what is important in life.

ex-Yet coping theory distinguishes among adaptivebehaviors that do not require effort, beliefs(which any of these questionnaire items mayreflect), and coping strategies Although not allinvestigators and theorists agree that “a hall-mark of coping is conscious choice” (Haan,

1992, p 268), we are persuaded by this point

of view (Tennen, Affleck, Armeli, & Carney,2000) From this perspective, searching for ev-idence of benefits is coping Taking the time toremind oneself of these perceived benefits is alsocoping But concluding that there have indeedbeen benefits associated with a negative lifeevent and reporting this belief during an inter-

view is not an example of coping The adaptive

value of this conclusion is irrelevant to whether

it is a coping strategy (Lazarus & Folkman,1984) Whereas only those who already have

discovered benefits from their adversity can use

this discovery to comfort themselves in difficult

times, there is nothing about the admission of

benefits per se which implies that

benefit-related cognitions will be used as effortful

cop-ing strategies The confusion between

benefit-finding as a coping strategy and benefit-benefit-finding

as a conclusion reflects a confusion in the

broader coping literature that has only rarely

been addressed (e.g., Aldwin & Revenson, 1987;

Tennen & Affleck, 1997)

Benefit-Finding Emerges Later in the

Adjustment Process

Current conceptualizations of how people adapt

to negative events typically portray a gradual

process Constructs such as “working through”

and moderated “dosing” of traumatic material

into awareness (Horowitz, 1986) capture this

sense of an unfolding process Even more

ex-plicit is the idea that people rebuild shattered

assumptions and pace their recovery over the

course of coping and adjustment

(Janoff-Bulman, 1992) Recently, these process-oriented

models have been applied to benefit-finding

Park (1998), for example, has suggested that

only over time do individuals come to alter the

perceived value of a traumatic experience or

de-rive benefits from the experience Similarly,

Te-deschi and Calhoun (1995) reserve benefits such

as a sense of personal strength and perceived

growth as emerging rather late in the process

of adapting to adversity

The recent distinction between

“sense-making” (i.e., making sense of adversity within

one’s existing worldview) and benefit-finding

(Davis et al., 1998; Janoff-Bulman & Frantz,

1997) also assumes that benefit-finding should

emerge relatively late in the process of adapting

to adversity It has been argued that if

sense-making is going to emerge from a negative

event, it should do so within several months of

the event (Wortman, Silver, & Kessler, 1993),

and that individuals who adapt successfully to a

threatening event first make sense of the event

and only later find benefit from the experience

(Janoff-Bulman & Frantz, 1997)

One way to test this assumption is through

the association between the time since the event

and benefit-finding Based on cross-sectional

studies in which there have been tests of this

association, no support has emerged for the

no-tion that benefit-finding emerges later during

adjustment Among these studies, a positive

as-sociation between time since the negative eventand benefit-finding was found in one (Ferrell,Dow, Leigh, Ly, & Gulasekaram, 1995), a neg-ative association was reported in another(Fromm, Andrykowski, & Hunt, 1996), and noassociations were reported in others (e.g., Park,Cohen, & Murch, 1996)

In the longitudinal studies that we rized earlier, there also is no strong support forthe assumption that benefit-finding emergeslater in the adjustment process Thompson

summa-(1985) found that victims of a fire showed no

change in their perception of benefits over thecourse of a year Although Davis et al (1998)found support for Janoff-Bulman and Frantz’s(1997) hypothesis that benefit-finding is morestrongly related to positive adjustment overtime, and they categorized slightly more oftheir bereaved participants as “benefit gainers”rather than “benefit losers” from 6 monthspostloss to 13 months postloss, the vast major-ity of participants reported no changes in ben-efit-finding McMillen et al (1997) found thattornado victims and survivors of a mass shoot-ing showed comparably high levels of benefit-finding several weeks and 3 years after theevent, whereas those involved in a plane crashreported a decline in perceived benefits over thesame time frame The 8 years during which Af-fleck et al (1987) followed heart attack victimsaffords us the longest time in which to examinethis issue regarding the temporal dynamics ofbenefit-finding Yet they, too, reported remark-able stability from 7 weeks to 8 years after thefirst attack

In sum, there is little empirical support forthe three major assumptions guiding currenttheory and research on benefit-finding in theaftermath of a negative life event Although

finding benefits may for some individuals reflect

a selective evaluation, there is no evidence thatparticipants in the studies we reviewed weremaking selective evaluations Similarly, while

benefit-finding can be a coping strategy, rarely

has it been measured in a way that would rant such an inference And when it has beenmeasured as a coping strategy in the form ofbenefit-reminding, it shows only modest con-cordance to benefit-finding measured as a belief

war-or conclusion (Affleck & Tennen, 1996) Finally,the assumption that benefit-finding emergesrelatively late in the process of adapting to amajor loss or threatening event is supportedneither in cross-sectional nor in longitudinalstudies Rather, benefits appear to be found

within weeks of the event and retained for

many years

Testable Alternatives

If benefit-finding as it has been examined in the

psychological literature is neither a selective

evaluation nor a coping strategy, and if it does

not emerge over time as part of an effort to

“work through” a painful encounter, how

might we best understand this phenomenon?

We now entertain five alternative views of

benefit-finding, each of which we believe

war-rants empirical examination

Benefit-Finding as a

Personality Characteristic

McAdams (1993) has conjectured that trauma

or crisis provides an opportunity for people to

re-create their life narratives and to structure a

life story with coherence and meaning From

this perspective, there are individuals who

char-acteristically provide narratives in which

mis-fortune or life tragedy contains a positive aspect

or leads to a positive outcome Those people

with the greatest psychological resources may

also be the ones who describe episodes in which

adversity ultimately leads to some personal gain

or benefit If this is so, perhaps the positive

qualities interpreted by investigators as

adap-tational consequences of benefit-finding are

ac-tually a characteristic of those individuals who

are more likely to generate “redemptive

se-quences” in which personal benefit or gain is an

integral part We may gain important insights

by exploring this explanation of the relationship

between benefit-finding and adjustment

Benefit-Finding as a Reflection of

Growth or Change

An emerging literature on posttraumatic

growth (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1995) and

thriv-ing (Epel et al., 1998) approaches the claim of

benefits not as a cognitive construction designed

to protect threatened assumptions but as an

in-dicator of genuine positive change The

distinc-tion between benefit-finding as a selective

ap-praisal and reported benefits as a veridical

perception of change is critical to how we

in-terpret research findings linking benefit-finding

to adaptational outcomes Consider the woman

who has experienced a natural disaster and

re-sponds to an interviewer’s query about benefits

or gains by claiming that the disaster has madeher see what is important in life Along withher new perspective, she finds that she is lessdisturbed by everyday disappointments and thatothers are responding to her new outlook on lifewith both emotional and material support Howshould the investigator interpret her scores on

an indicator of well-being? Is her positive aptation a product of a selective appraisal (i.e.,benefit-finding), or is her appraisal an accuraterepresentation of her positive adaptation? In theonly study, to our knowledge, in which therehas been an attempt to corroborate reports ofpersonal growth derived from negative events,Park et al (1996) found significant intrapairagreement between the reports of participantsand those of close friends and relatives whoserved as informants We believe that consen-sual validation of reports of personal growthpresents a genuine challenge to a purely con-structivist view of benefit-finding

ad-Benefit-Finding as an Explanation ofOne’s Temperament

Some of the benefits reported by individualsfacing adversity may represent a way in whichthey explain their characteristic hedonic level(Brickman, Coates, & Janoff-Bulman, 1978).The well-adjusted extrovert who feels relativelyhappy regardless of his circumstances may findhimself feeling happy despite a recent life crisis

To make sense of his continued positive tional state—which does not fit the stereotype

emo-of someone in the aftermath emo-of crisis—he tributes it to what may seem like a newfoundcapacity to appreciate life’s small pleasures or tofeel grateful for past good fortune When asked

at-in a research at-interview if he has experiencedany benefits or gains from his untoward expe-rience, he is likely to offer his appreciation ofthe little things in life and sense of gratitude

In doing so, he may be providing a satisfyingexplanation for his temperament McCrae (per-sonal communication, May 1996) asserts thatbecause distressing events are incompatible withhigh hedonic levels, the people who are mostlikely to experience benefits are those who al-ready are functioning well Individuals who aremore chronically distressed have no need forcognitive reappraisal when they face adversitybecause their emotional state fits their circum-stance The notion that benefit-finding is moti-vated by a need to provide a satisfying expla-

nation of one’s temperament poses yet another

challenge to current formulations of cognitive

adaptation to adversity and underscores the

need for prospective inquiry by proponents of

positive psychology who are interested in

benefit-finding The idea inherent in this

inter-pretation of benefit-finding, that people hold

personal theories regarding how they should be

responding to adversity, is central to yet

an-other alternative explanation of benefit-finding

to which we now turn

Perceived Benefits and Implicit Theories

of Consistency and Change

By its very nature, the report of some benefit

in the aftermath of an untoward event requires

an individual to compare her current status on

a particular dimension with her status on the

same dimension prior to the event Thus, for an

individual who is facing adversity to determine

that her self-concept, relationships with others,

or life priorities have changed in a positive way,

she must compare her current standing on these

dimensions with a recalled version of a former

self

Drawing on Tulving’s (1972) distinction

be-tween episodic and semantic memory and

wide-ranging investigations of the recall process,

Ross (1989) argues convincingly that “people

possess implicit theories of change, ideas about

the conditions that are likely to foster

altera-tions in themselves and others,” and that

“peo-ple’s theories may lead them to overestimate

the amount of change that has occurred”

(p 342)

Ross (1989) asserts that the recollection of

personal attributes at a previous time involves

two steps First the individual notes his or her

present status on the attribute Using present

status as a benchmark, he or she then uses an

implicit theory of stability or change to guide a

construction of the past When pertinent

infor-mation cannot be recalled, the individual uses

his or her implicit theory and present status on

the relevant attribute to create a plausible past

(cf Belleza & Bower, 1981) As Ross (1989)

notes and as evidence indicates (e.g., Woodruff

& Birren, 1972), people’s theories may lead

them to experience more change than has

ac-tually occurred

A long and widely held premise in Western

culture is that people gain wisdom, positive

per-sonality changes, more meaningful relations

with others, and more productive lives in theaftermath of threatening encounters (Collins,Taylor, & Skokan, 1990) Such changes are pre-cisely those reported regularly by research par-ticipants in studies of adaptation to threateningevents These culturally anticipated benefitsfrom adversity have been a central theme inWestern literature, poetry, and widely read ac-counts of traumatic experiences The notion ofbenefiting from adversity also appears in phil-osophical writings and has found its way intosocial commentaries, self-help manuals, and in-creasingly popular accounts of trauma.Whereas in the current models of adaptation

to adversity benefit-finding is interpreted as a

motivated construction of the present, the

im-plicit theory approach views benefit-finding as

a by-product of the “dispassionate” tion of the past (Ross, 1989) It predicts that

reconstruc-exaggeration of positive change should occurwhen a person’s theory of change leads him orher to anticipate such change when little or nochange has actually occurred Experimentalfindings (e.g., Conway & Ross, 1984; see alsoSinger & Salovey, 1993) provide evidence forthis reconstruction process

Yet not everyone who experiences adversitycites benefits The implicit theories approach ac-knowledges individual differences in the percep-tion of positive change, and Ross (1989) offersseveral situational factors that should produce anegative bias in the recollection of one’s per-sonal history, and thus the perception that thepresent is more positive than the past First, themore widely a theory of change is embraced in

a culture, the more likely it is that the majority

of individuals will implicitly accept the theory.Second, the more time that has passed, the morepeople turn to implicit theories to fill the gaps.Third, whereas little or no actual change pro-vides fertile ground for biasing one’s recollec-tion of the past, unequivocal negative change on

a particular dimension makes it difficult for anindividual to evaluate him- or herself as evenmore negative in the past Together, these threesituational parameters lead to the following pre-dictions: (a) in view of pervasive cultural sup-port for the implicit theory of benefits from ad-versity, many people should cite such benefits;(b) although people may perceive benefits at anytime during a threatening encounter, such ben-efits are more likely to emerge later in the en-counter; and (c) benefits are far less likely to bereported on a particular dimension among in-

dividuals who have experienced an obvious

de-cline on that dimension In the literature on

benefit-finding, we see unambiguous support

for the first prediction, no support for the

sec-ond prediction, and virtual silence regarding the

third prediction

Unfortunately, because of the constructivist

underpinnings in most current theories of

benefit-finding, investigators have not been

en-couraged to examine whether participants have

declined, remained the same, or actually made

gains on the dimension for which benefits have

been reported For those who retain quaint

no-tions of “reality” and gains “actually made,”

such data would be most helpful in direct

com-parisons of competing explanations According

to the implicit theories model, an individual

who has actually declined in a particular life

do-main following a threatening event is unlikely

to report benefits in that domain Thus, people

who have had notable declines in their

self-concepts, relationships with social networks,

and life priorities—the three most consistently

reported domains in which benefits have been

reported (Updegraff & Taylor, 2000)—are least

likely to report benefits Furthermore, to the

ex-tent that such declines are associated with

de-moralization, these individuals are also most

likely to report high levels of negative affect,

low levels of positive affect, and more distress

than their counterparts Therefore, the rather

consistent association between benefit-finding

and emotional well-being may be telling us how

deteriorated functioning in the aftermath of

ad-versity produces both emotional distress and the

inhibition of perceived benefits

More skeptical readers might argue that

though the implicit theories model offers an

al-ternative explanation for the association

be-tween benefit-finding and emotional well-being,

it cannot explain how perceived benefits predict

the health outcomes we described earlier,

in-cluding a second heart attack and related

mor-bidity (Affleck et al., 1987), an infant’s

devel-opmental outcome (Affleck et al., 1991), and

AIDS-related mortality (Bower et al., 1998)

This is true, though there is converging

evi-dence that positive emotions promote physical

health (Taylor, Kemeny, Reed, Bower, &

Gru-enewald, 2000) More to the point, existing

for-mulations of benefit-finding also are unable to

explain why finding benefits anticipates

de-creased morbidity and mortality Although

there has been no shortage of speculation

re-garding the physiological mediators of such arelationship, including the possibility thatbenefit-finding buffers stress-related changes inthe sympathetic nervous system and/or thehypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (Bower etal., 1998), or that it facilitates cortisol habitua-tion (Epel, et al., 1998), the devil, as always, is

in the details Moreover, even firm conceptualand empirical links between benefit-finding andhealth outcomes would favor no particular

model regarding the emergence of perceived

benefits among individuals facing adverse cumstances We urge investigators approachingthe phenomenon of benefit-finding from thepositive psychology perspective to consider andtest these competing formulations

cir-Benefit-Finding as aTemporal ComparisonIndividuals experiencing serious illness andother major threats compare themselves withless fortunate others while affiliating with in-dividuals who appear to be adapting well to asimilar threat Taylor and colleagues (e.g.,Buunk, Collins, Taylor, Van Yperen, & Dakof,1990) have documented how people facing alife-threatening illness turn to downward socialcomparisons to make their own situation seemless severe, and to upward comparisons to main-tain hope But serious illness also is likely toincrease the salience of one’s own past AsKlauer, Ferring, and Filipp (1998) note, a centraltenet of temporal comparison theory (TCT; Al-bert, 1977) is that people are most likely tocompare their current situation with the pastduring critical life events TCT posits that al-though individuals are inclined to evaluate theself as stable, when efforts to reduce negativediscrepancies between the past and the presentare unsuccessful, they will then construct pos-itive changes, including subjective evidence ofmaturation, progress, and growth (Klauer et al.,1998)

Although temporal comparisons have beenexamined occasionally in studies of adaptation

to serious illness (Collins et al., 1990), we areunaware of any study in which there has been

a direct comparison of perceived benefits andtemporal comparisons Yet Klauer et al (1998)found that the most commonly endorsed tem-poral comparisons were related to beliefs aboutlife and relationships with social networks.These perceived changes mirror those reported

in the benefit-finding literature In view of these

similarities, we encourage positive

psychol-ogy investigators to distinguish temporal

com-parisons from benefit-finding, and to determine

if benefit-finding uniquely influences

well-being

Directions for Research and

Intervention and Implications for

Positive Psychology

We are confident that the phenomenon of

benefit-finding has a great deal to offer the

ex-isting literature on adaptation to adversity and

the emerging literature on positive psychology

The sense of wisdom, enhanced capacity for

for-giveness and empathy, increased spirituality,

and more positive relations with others often

reported by individuals who have experienced

adversity correspond to the characteristics that

have fueled the recent surge of interest in

pos-itive psychology But it would be unfortunate if

investigators interested in positive psychological

constructs turned to the same cross-sectional

designs as their predecessors, or if they thought

that relying almost exclusively on self-reports

of positive emotional states was actually a major

improvement over previous studies that have

relied excessively on self-reports of negative

states If we could offer only one message for

positive psychology, it would be to underscore

the need for prospective studies of

benefit-finding and benefit-reminding that include

ob-jective indicators of health and well-being.

Another problem that demands our attention

is that little is actually known about how best

to measure benefit-finding On the one hand,

multi-item questionnaires of stress-related

growth (Park et al., 1996), posttraumatic growth

(Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1995), and benefit-finding

(Tennen et al., 1992) stand on the premise that

finding more benefits in adversity yields a

greater adaptational advantage than finding

fewer benefits Yet interview-based studies

con-sistently find that any reported benefit provides

adaptational advantages compared with no

ben-efits, and that finding more than one benefit

provides no additional gain.1In fact several

au-thors (e.g., Lehman et al., 1993; Park, 1998)

have suggested that a balance between

percep-tions of positive changes and the recognition of

negative sequelae may best predict positive

ad-justment (but see King & Miner, 2000) But

be-fore rushing to improve the measurement of

benefit-finding, positive psychology would dowell by focusing on its conceptualization Wesuspect that superior measures of benefit-finding will emerge only after we are able todiscern whether this phenomenon is best con-ceived as a selective evaluation, a coping strat-egy, a personality characteristic, a reflection ofverifiable change or growth, an explanation ofone’s temperament, a manifestation of an im-plicit theory of change, or a temporal compari-son Such conceptual challenges may be evenmore daunting than the methodological chal-lenges facing this area of investigation But ifpositive psychology is to make genuine contri-butions to this field of inquiry, theorists andresearchers must be ready to do much morethan offer new indicators of positive adjust-ment

The rather consistent connection betweenbenefit-finding and both psychological andhealth outcomes has led to the understandabledesire to directly influence these adaptationalprocesses Nothing in this chapter should betaken as evidence that deliberate attempts to in-fluence the perception of benefits will be help-ful Yet three recent studies suggest that theperception of benefits may be influenced bycarefully constructed interventions King andMiner (2000) found that compared with controlsubjects, college students who wrote about thebenefits they experienced from a negative lifeevent had fewer health center visits over thenext 5 months Similarly, Stanton et al (2000)reported that women who wrote about positivethoughts and feelings regarding their ongoingexperience with breast cancer had fewer medicalappointments for cancer-related morbiditiesthan did women in a control group But neither

of these experimental interventions attempted

to shape or influence the perception of benefits.Antoni et al (2001) found that a cognitive-behavioral stress management intervention,which focused on emotional expression, dis-couraged avoidance coping, and encouraged asense of confidence and positive reframing as acoping response, increased patients’ reports ofbenefits from having had breast cancer Theirintervention, however, did not specifically at-tempt to get these women to acknowledge ben-efits As we have mentioned elsewhere (Affleck

et al., 1991; Tennen & Affleck, 1999), our search participants have mentioned repeatedlythat they view even well-intentioned efforts toencourage benefit-finding as insensitive and in-ept They are almost always interpreted as an

re-*Janoff-Bulman, R., & Frantz, C M (1997) The

impact of trauma on meaning: From

meaning-less world to meaningful life In M Power &

C R Brewin (Eds.), The transformation of

meaning in psychological therapies (pp 91–

106) New York: Wiley

King, L A., & Miner, K N (2000) Writing

about the perceived benefits of traumatic

events: Implications for physical health

Per-sonality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26,

220–230

Klauer, T., Ferring, D., & Filipp, S H (1998) “Still

stable after all this ?”: Temporal comparison

in coping with severe and chronic disease

In-ternational Journal of Behavioral Development,

22, 339–355.

Lazarus, R S (1999) Stress and emotion: A new

synthesis New York: Springer.

Lazarus, R S., & Folkman, S (1984) Stress,

ap-praisal, and coping New York: Springer.

Leana, C R., Feldman, D C., & Tan G Y (1998)

Predictors of coping behavior after a layoff

Journal of Organizational Behavior, 19, 85–97.

Lehman, D R., Davis, C G., DeLongis, A.,

Wort-man, C B., Bluck, S., Mandel, D R., & Ellard,

J (1993) Positive and negative life changes after

bereavement and their relations to adjustment

Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 12,

90–112

McAdams, D P (1993) The stories we live by:

Personal myths and the making of the self New

York: Morrow

McIntosh, D N., Silver, R C., & Wortman, C B

(1993) Religion’s role in adjustment to a

neg-ative life event: Coping with the loss of a child

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,

65, 812–821.

McMillen, J C., Smith, E M., & Fisher, R H

(1997) Perceived benefit and mental health after

three types of disaster Journal of Consulting

and Clinical Psychology, 65, 733–739.

Park, C L (1998) Implications of posttraumatic

growth for individuals In R G Tedeschi, C L

Park, & L G Calhoun (Eds.), Posttraumatic

growth: Positive changes in the aftermath of

crisis (pp 153–177) Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Park, C L., Cohen, L H., & Murch, R L (1996)

Assessment and prediction of stress-related

growth Journal of Personality, 64, 71–105.

Park, C L., & Folkman, S (1997) Meaning in the

context of stress and coping Review of General

Psychology, 2, 115–144.

*Ross, M (1989) Relation of implicit theories to

the construction of personal histories

Psycho-logical Review, 96, 341–357.

Schwarz, N., & Strack, F (1999) Reports of

sub-jective well-being: Judgmental processes and

their methodological implications In D

Kah-neman, E Diener, & N Schwarz (Eds.),

Well-being: The foundations of hedonic psychology

(pp 61–84) New York: Russell Sage dation

Foun-Singer, J A., & Salovey, P (1993) The

remem-bered self: Emotion and memory in personality.

New York: Free Press

Snyder, C R., & McCullough, M E (2001) A itive psychology field of dreams: “If you build

pos-it, they will come ” Journal of Social and

Clinical Psychology, 19, 151–160.

Stanton, A L., Danoff-Burg, S., Sworowski, L A.,Collins, C A (2001) Randomized, controlledstudy of written emotional disclosure and ben-

efit finding in breast cancer patients

Psychoso-matic Medicine, 63, 122.

Taylor, S E (1983) Adjustment to threatening

events: A theory of cognitive adaptation

Amer-ican Psychologist, 38, 1161–1173.

Taylor, S E., Kemeny, M E., Reed, G M., Bower,

J E., & Gruenewald, T L (2000) Psychological

resources, positive illusions, and health

Tedeschi, R G., & Calhoun, L G (1995) Trauma

and transformation: Growing in the aftermath

of suffering Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

*Tedeschi, R G., Park, C L., & Calhoun, L G.(1998) Posttraumatic growth: Conceptual is-sues In R G Tedeschi, C L Park, & L G Cal-

houn (Eds.), Posttraumatic growth: Positive

changes in the aftermath of crisis (pp 1–22).

Tennen, H., & Affleck, G (1999) Finding benefits

in adversity In C R Snyder (Ed.), Coping: The

psychology of what works (pp 279–304) New

York: Oxford University Press

Tennen, H., Affleck, G., Armeli, S., & Carney,

M A (2000) A daily process approach to ing: Linking theory, research, and practice

cop-American Psychologist, 55, 626–636.

Tennen, H., Affleck, G., Urrows, S., Higgins, P., &Mendola, R (1992) Perceiving control, constru-ing benefits, and daily processes in rheumatoid

arthritis Canadian Journal of Behavioral

Sci-ence, 24, 186–203.

Thompson, S (1985) Finding positive meaning in

a stressful event and coping Basic and Applied

Social Psychology, 6, 279–295.

Tulving, E (1972) Episodic and semantic memory.

In E Tulving & W Donaldson (Eds.),

Organi-zation of memory (pp 381–403) New York:

Ac-ademic Press

Updegraff, J A., & Taylor, S E (2000) From

vul-nerability to growth: Positive and negative

ef-fects of stressful life events In J H Harvey &

E D Miller (Eds.), Loss and trauma: General

and close relationship perspectives (pp 3–28).

to bereavement In M S Strobe, W Strobe,

& R O Hansson (Eds.), Bereavement: A

sourcebook of research and intervention

(pp 349–366) London: Cambridge UniversityPress

Positive Responses to Loss

Perceiving Benefits and Growth

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema & Christopher G Davis

I tend to look at it generally as if all the

things that happen in my life are a gift, for

whatever reason, or however they happen It

doesn’t necessarily have to be only pleasant

gifts, but everything that happens there’s a

meaning I’ve had a lot of suffering in my life

and through that I’ve learned a great deal.

While I wouldn’t want to go back and relive

that, I’m grateful for it because it makes me

who I am There’s a lot of joys and sorrows,

but they all enrich life.

(Alicia, quoted in Nolen-Hoeksema &

Larson, 1999, p 143)

Alicia had recently lost someone she loved

dearly to a long battle with cancer Although

the death of a loved one is a negative experience

by any definition, Alicia’s positive outlook on

her loss is typical In our research with recently

bereaved people, we have found that 70% to

80% report finding some positive aspect in their

experience with loss (Davis, Nolen-Hoeksema,

& Larson, 1998; see also Calhoun & Tedeschi,

1990; Edmonds & Hooker, 1992; Lehman et al.,

1993; Tennen & Affleck, 1999; Yalom & berman, 1991)

Lie-Such reports of positive life changes do notnecessarily reflect or signify growth or positivetransformation of the self For example, suchstatements also might reflect defensiveness orself-esteem protection (see Davis, Lehman, &Wortman, 2000) Yet we suspect that at leastfor some individuals who have been throughsignificant adversity, the positive life changesthat they report may be part of a process ofgrowth or positive transformation The experi-ence of loss can lead people to change how theysee themselves, how they perceive the worldaround them, and where they are going withtheir lives Loss events, especially those that aresudden or unexpected, often appear to initiate apersonal evaluation or stocktaking of the mean-ing of one’s life

In this chapter, we review and integrate someempirical research on the processes by whichpeople find meaning and growth within theirloss experiences We draw a distinction betweentwo notions of meaning—making sense of a lossand finding benefit in the experience with loss—

and suggest that both may facilitate the process

of growth or positive transformation We

ex-amine the predictors of who is and is not able

to find something positive in loss, as well as the

mental health consequences of finding

some-thing positive We end by discussing the

impli-cations of our work for interventions with the

bereaved

Historical Roots

An interest in the growth potential of humans

has long been a tenet of humanistic and

exis-tential psychology Viktor Frankl, a leading

pro-ponent of the existentialist movement in

psy-chology, has argued that a fundamental,

motivating force in people’s behavior is a will

to meaning (Frankl, 1955/1986; 1959/1962).

According to this view, creating and sustaining

meaning gives one’s life a sense of authenticity

(see Snyder, Rand, & Sigmon, this volume)

Frankl argued that when meaning is lacking,

people are motivated to restore or develop new

life meanings to avoid the pain and angst of a

meaningless existence

Frankl (1959/1962) theorized that

meaning-lessness stems from despair over the perceived

loss of goals, ambitions, and purpose in life

Thus, to the extent that loss and trauma events

shatter goals, ambitions, and purpose in one’s

life, one is apt to experience such an existential

crisis How one responds to this crisis is critical,

according to Frankl, and he challenged his

cli-ents to create new life meanings as a means of

defeating the feelings of loss and suffering:

Whenever one has to face a fate which

can-not be changed, just then one is given a last

chance to actualize the highest value, to

ful-fill the deepest meaning, the meaning of

suffering For what matters above all is the

attitude we take toward suffering, the

atti-tude in which we take our suffering upon

ourselves (Frankl, 1959/1962, p 114)

From this perspective, growth represents a

process of establishing and committing oneself

to a new set of broad goals, ambitions, or

pur-pose that gives one’s life a general sense of

di-rection (see also Snyder, 2000) As such, it is

intimately tied to what McAdams (1996) has

described as the deepest level of personality:

one’s sense of self or identity In our view, then,

growth or transformation represents a

funda-mental shifting of the life goals and purposesthat significantly influence one’s sense of iden-tity

But how do people create new or revised lifemeaning following an existential crisis brought

on by loss? How does one transform the rience of loss into a positive, life-renewing ex-perience? Empirically, there is little to guide usbecause we and others have struggled to ade-quately measure growth (as defined previously).But from our reading of the literature and theobservations culled from the wisdom of our be-reaved research participants, we suggest thattwo processes of meaning-making might facili-tate the process of growth following personalloss: making sense of loss and perceiving ben-efits or positives in the experience of copingwith that loss (Davis et al., 1998)

expe-Making Sense of Loss Versus Finding Benefit in the Experience

The modern literature on meaning-making lowing a loss or trauma generally has not dis-tinguished clearly between finding some mean-ing in a loss and finding some benefit in a lossexperience (for detailed discussion of these is-sues, see Davis et al., 1998; Davis et al., 2000).Recent theorizing, however, has sharpened thedistinction between these two processes (e.g.,Affleck & Tennen, 1996; Janoff-Bulman &Frantz, 1997) Janoff-Bulman and Frantz (1997)have suggested that making sense of a trauma

fol-or loss involves understanding how the eventfits with one’s view of the world (in terms

of beliefs about justice, fairness, predictability ofone’s social world) They refer to this type of

meaning as meaning-as-comprehensibility At

least in Western cultures, people tend to believethat important events in their lives are control-lable and understandable (e.g., Heider, 1958;Kelley, 1972) People believe that negativeevents are not distributed randomly, that peopleget what they deserve, and that justice will pre-vail (Janoff-Bulman, 1992; Lerner, 1980).Events such as the loss of a loved one can shat-ter these assumptions This is particularly likely

to be true when the loss is unexpected, due totragic circumstances (such as a car accident), or

“nonnormative,” for example, when a youngchild dies

In contrast to the notion of meaning as prehensibility, Janoff-Bulman and Frantz (1997)suggest that benefit-finding represents an at-

com-tempt to understand the value or worth of the

loss for one’s life, which they describe as

meaning-as-significance Perceiving some

ben-efit to the loss, such as reporting a change in

one’s life perspective, can help to mitigate

feel-ings of helplessness and grief and preserve the

sense that one’s own life has purpose, value, and

worth Janoff-Bulman and Frantz (1997) argue

that successful adaptation involves turning a

de-sire to make sense of the event into finding

some value or benefit in the experience

Our own work leads us to suggest that

mak-ing sense of loss and findmak-ing benefit in the

ex-perience represent two distinct processes, with

different predictors, different time courses, and

different outcomes (Davis et al., 1998) This is

not to say that the two proposed processes do

not jointly influence the adjustment process

Elsewhere we have proposed that perceiving

benefits may alleviate, and in some sense

com-pensate for, a strong desire to comprehend a

senseless death (Davis & Nolen-Hoeksema,

2001)

Our data come from the Stanford

Bereave-ment Project, a large, multiwave bereaveBereave-ment

study conducted in the San Francisco Bay area

(Davis et al., 1998; Nolen-Hoeksema & Davis,

1999; Hoeksema & Larson, 1999;

Nolen-Hoeksema, Parker, & Larson, 1994) Potential

participants were recruited through a number of

hospices in the Bay area At initial contact, all

participants were losing a loved one through

terminal illnesses When possible, participants

took part in structured, in-person interviews

prior to the loss and then were followed for

ap-proximately 18 months after the loss, with

structured, in-person interviews occurring at

approximately 1, 6, 13, and 18 months

follow-ing the loss

When we were designing the interview for

this study, there were already clues in the

lit-erature that making sense of a loss and finding

benefits in it were two different issues Thus, in

open-ended questions at the end of the 6-, 13-,

and 18-month postloss interviews, we asked

participants two questions One addressed

whether respondents had been able to make

sense of their loss: “Do you feel that you have

been able to make sense of the death?” The

other asked respondents whether they had

found anything positive in their loss:

“Some-times people who lose a loved one find some

positive aspect in the experience For example,

some people feel they learn something about

themselves or others Have you found anything

positive in this experience?” Responses to each

of these questions were coded in two ways.First, three independent coders categorized eachopen-ended response as either “yes,” “no,”

“ambiguous or partly,” or “not interested in theissue.” Second, the responses were coded for theparticular type of meaning or benefit respon-dents said they had gained

At all three interviews in which these twoquestions were asked (i.e., at 6, 13, and 18months), the majority of respondents indicatedthat they had been able to make sense of theloss (68%, 68%, and 63%, respectively), and amajority reported that they had been able tofind something positive in the loss (73%, 80%,and 77%, respectively) But, consistent withother research (Davis, Wortman, Lehman, &Silver, in press), there was very little overlapbetween the responses to the making-sense andfinding-benefit questions Among those respon-dents coded “yes” or “no” to both of the ques-tions (i.e., excluding those coded “ambiguous/partly” or “not interested in the issue”), therewas no association between being able to makesense of the loss and reporting benefits (Davis

et al., 1998) In addition, there was little overlap

in the particular ways respondents said they hadmade sense or had gained benefit That is, state-ments of benefit or growth were rarely given inresponse to the make-sense question, and state-ments that explained how the respondent hadmade sense of the loss were rarely offered inresponse to the finding-benefit question.Although both finding meaning and findingbenefit in the loss were associated with betteradjustment (see later discussion), the timecourse for the association between these varia-bles and adjustment differed The respondentswho were unable to make sense of their losswithin the first 6 months generally were unable

to make sense of it later on In addition, thosewho did make sense for the first time at the 13-

or 18-month interviews gave explanations thatdiffered in content and tone from those whowere able to make sense 6 months after the loss.These late-arriving explanations tended to sug-gest that the world is not as ordered, just, orbenevolent as they once thought it was As onerespondent put it,

The sense of his death is that there is nosense Those things just happen Thesense of his death for me is “get ready todie.” Don’t be surprised when it happens.Don’t think that somehow you’re going to

be exempt from it There’s no

underly-ing sense of order in the sense that thunderly-ings

progress in an expectable pattern Well, the

pattern is that you’re born and you die

This respondent ironically is making sense by

adopting the philosophy that death makes no

sense The respondent seems to have come to

the conclusion that the only way to make sense

of the event is to change a benign worldview—

that what happens in life is ordered and

pre-dictable—to one that is considerably less

be-nign In contrast, those who made sense by 6

months overwhelmingly suggested meanings or

interpretations of the event that were largely

consistent with worldviews that are more

be-nign (e.g., perceiving the event as a natural part

of the life cycle, or as part of God’s plan)

More-over, whereas making sense in the first 6

months after the loss was significantly

associ-ated with decrements in emotional distress

(from pre-loss to post-loss), making sense for

the first time in later interviews was not

signif-icantly associated with changes in emotional

distress (see Davis et al., 1998) Similar patterns

of findings have appeared in other bereavement

studies (Davis et al., 2000)

In contrast to the meaning responses, finding

something positive in the loss was associated

with better adjustment at all three interviews,

even when respondents were finding something

positive for the first time at the later interviews

In addition, the relationship between finding

something positive and adjustment increased

significantly over time That is, the later in the

grief process respondents found benefit in their

loss, the more the finding benefit relieved their

distress

Thus, finding some benefit in a loss and

find-ing some meanfind-ing in the loss appear to be

dis-tinct processes First, they are uncorrelated with

each other Second, they unfold along different

time courses People who find meaning shortly

after a loss appear to find more positive

mean-ings and have better emotional adjustment than

people who finding meaning long after a loss

In contrast, finding benefit in a loss is associated

with positive adjustment regardless of when

benefits are found

We have focused on the predictors and

im-plications of finding meaning in a loss in other

publications (Davis & Nolen-Hoeksema, 2001;

Davis et al., 2000) In this chapter, we focus on

what it means to find something positive in a

of a loved one Through these processes, a son preserves or restores the idea that life haspurpose and worth, which may be critical towell-being (Antonovsky, 1987; Frankl, 1959/1962; Janoff-Bulman, 1992; Taylor, 1983;Thompson & Janigian, 1988) Taylor (1983,1989; Taylor & Armor, 1996) has argued thatthreats to one’s sense of self often are dimin-ished by perceiving the event as a “wake-upcall” suggesting that one’s priorities and goalsare not as they should be The reordering ofpriorities and the revision of life goals are part

per-of a reappraisal per-of the event as an opportunityfor growth rather than only as a loss (Park, Co-hen, & Murch, 1996), and this reappraisal may

be a coping strategy that helps to bolster esteem (Affleck & Tennen, 1996; Taylor & Ar-mor, 1996)

self-Other theorists have argued, however, thattraumatic events such as loss can create true de-velopmental change by confronting people withnew situations and issues (Tedeschi & Calhoun,1995; Thompson & Janigian, 1988) Major rolesmay change—a woman may perceive she is nolonger her husband’s wife or mother’s daugh-ter People who lose their parents now may per-ceive themselves as the “head of the family” or

“the last one left in my generation.” Youngwidowhood may mean being thrust abruptlyand involuntarily into single parenthood Theseshifts in roles and in self-perceptions can lead

to major developmental changes Certainly, serving yourself doing things you neverthought you could do also can lead to growthand change in self-perceptions

ob-Whatever the role of finding benefit in atrauma, the types of benefits that people tend

to find show remarkable consistency over fering traumas (e.g., Collins, Taylor, & Skokan,1990; Lehman et al., 1993; Park et al., 1996;Taylor, Kemeny, Reed, & Aspinwall, 1991; Ten-

dif-nen & Affleck, 1999) Three benefits commonly

reported across studies are that the experience

with the event led to a growth in character, a

gain in perspective, and a strengthening of

re-lationships We will illustrate each of these

ben-efits with material from our interviews with

re-cently bereaved people

The bereaved people in our research talked

about a number of ways in which their

person-alities have changed for the better and about

new skills they gained as a result of the loss

experience (see also Calhoun & Tedeschi, 1990;

Lund, Caserta, & Dimond, 1993) Sometimes

the growth in character that they detected in

themselves was in the form of an increased

em-pathy for and understanding of others, as

de-scribed by these two bereaved people, who lost

their mothers to cancer:

I learned about compassion, I learned about

suffering Suffering leads to compassion

Compassion leads to beauty It was an

op-portunity to look at myself and to be

non-complacent I was always very complacent

before I thought I had it made I was

stag-nating It opened my heart, my mind, and

my spirit I wish it had happened another

way, but that’s the way it happened

I learned about love, and empathy Not so

much sympathy, because there was nothing

to be sympathetic, but empathy I can look

at people now and have more feeling for

their pain, for their feelings I think I have

learned more patience and tolerance for—I

see real old people in wheelchairs, people

who are having a struggle I feel more for

them than I did before taking care of my

mother (quoted in Nolen-Hoeksema &

Lar-son, 1999, pp 146–147)

Many of the participants in our study had

been caregivers to their loved ones for weeks or

months, while the loved ones were in the final

stages of cancer or some other terminal disease

They described engaging in activities they never

would have believed they could do, such as

pro-viding nursing care to the loved one, asserting

their loved one’s rights with physicians and

in-surance agencies, and managing conflicts in

their families Martha, who cared for her

83-year-old father as he died of cancer, said:

I saw myself acting in a role of competence

where I had to pull on all my resources just

to get through sometimes I would have to

be directing the medical people about what Iwanted to do A person like me who hatesshowing anger and can’t stand conflict Iwould have to stand and demand care fromthe nursing home, and it was necessary and

I did it So I came away with a feeling ofcompetence and strength and gratitude Thegratitude not for having to go through it, Iwould never have asked for it, but I can seehow the experience was a real benefit to me

I was forced to grow (quoted in Hoeksema & Larson, 1999, p 148)Related to a growth in character is a shift inperspectives that many bereaved people reportexperiencing The loss of their loved one makesthem acutely aware of the fragility and short-ness of life As a result, they often reprioritizetheir goals and re-evaluate their lifestyles Mostcommonly, they say that the loss of their lovedone has caused them to focus more on the hereand now rather than always focusing on the fu-ture, as Keith, who lost his wife to ovarian can-cer, describes:

Nolen-I probably take a lot shorter term view ofwhat’s going on I think there’s a lot more

of now than there ever was before I think

we all tend to respond that way to things—you know, we’ve got plenty of time, andthings will take care of themselves I’ve saidthings to people, and asked people to dothings that I’d no more done 6 months agothan fly I came from a family, hell, every-body lived into their nineties If there’s any-thing I want to do, don’t put if off, is thewhole thing I’m saying (quoted in Nolen-Hoeksema & Larson, 1999, pp 145–146)Finally, many bereaved people describe theirrelationships with family members and friends

as being stronger and richer following their loss(see also Calhoun & Tedeschi, 1990; Malinak,Hoyt, & Patterson, 1979; Zemore & Shepel,1989) Because they had a greater appreciationfor the shortness of life, they were more willing

to openly express their love for family membersand to forgive old conflicts They made moretime for others and tried to be more construc-tive in their relationships with others, as Karen,whose partner died of cancer, explains:

I learned that when you love someone, therelationship is so important It’s enhanced

my relationship with other people because I

realize that time is so important, and you

can waste so much effort on small,

insignifi-cant events or feelings I feel that in my

present relationship, I’m better able to be a

real good friend, and I don’t take things so

personally I don’t feel that someone’s got

to fill me up (quoted in Nolen-Hoeksema &

Larson, 1999, p 150)

Although the illness and loss of a family

member can create conflict among the rest of

the family, many of the bereaved people in our

study reported that they and their family

mem-bers had confronted and resolved long-standing

conflicts Often the conflicts had been with the

dying family member, but the impending death

had provided the motivation to overcome them

Will, whose 80-year-old mother died of

pancre-atic cancer after a long illness, explains:

During the last years of her life my mom

stopped drinking, so I came to know her in

a way that I was unable to when I was

growing up I learned a lot about the

rea-sons why my parents did some of the

things they did, felt some of the ways they

felt, and acted some of the ways they acted

It did not exactly reconcile me to the

situa-tion, but it’s sort of a balance (quoted in

Nolen-Hoeksema & Larson, 1999, p 151)

Who Is Able to Find Something

Positive?

The most consistent and strong predictor of

finding benefit in a trauma, in our work and

several other studies, is dispositional optimism

(e.g., Affleck & Tennen, 1996; Davis et al., 1998;

Park et al., 1996; Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1995;

Tennen & Affleck, 1999) People who generally

expect positive outcomes in their lives appear to

actively look for opportunities to turn

seem-ingly bad outcomes into good (see Carver and

Scheier, this volume) Consistent with this

in-terpretation, dispositional optimists were more

likely to use reappraisal coping—purposely

searching for positive reappraisal of events as a

way of coping with their aftermath

(Nolen-Hoeksema & Larson, 1999) In turn, the more

reappraisal coping they used, the more likely

they were to find something positive in their

loss These results bolster Frankl’s (1959/1962)

claim that it is the attitude that one adopts toadversity that is critical for adjustment.Other positive coping strategies that were as-sociated with finding benefit in the loss in ourbereavement study were engaging in activeproblem solving, seeking social support, and en-gaging in constructive expression of emotions(Nolen-Hoeksema & Larson, 1999) In contrast,finding something positive was not associatedwith the negative coping strategy known asavoidance coping This suggests that seekingsomething positive following a loss is not sim-ply a form of denial or defensiveness but is part

of a package of positive and active coping egies

strat-These results correspond to those of Snyder(1994; Snyder, Cheavens, & Michael, 1999; seealso Tennen & Affleck, 1999), who found thatpeople high on dispositional hope use positivereappraisal, problem solving, and positive dis-traction as coping strategies for a variety ofstressors but do not use avoidance coping anddenial Dispositional hope is more than dispo-sitional optimism in that hopeful people focusnot only on future goals, as optimists do, butalso on goals they believe they can attain Thissuggests that people high on dispositional hopewould be precisely those people who go search-ing for benefits in their losses (see Snyder,2000)

Although it may seem that it is easier to findbenefits in some types of loss than others, wefound that the characteristics of the loss did notpredict who was able to find something positive(Davis et al., 1998) For example, the age of thedeceased at the time of death did not predictwhether respondents were able to find some-thing positive, suggesting that it is not moredifficult to find something positive in less nor-mative losses, such as the loss of a young per-son, than in more normative losses, such as theloss of an elderly person Similarly, whether re-spondents had or had not been a caregiver tothe deceased did not predict their ability to findsomething positive in their loss This lack of as-sociation between the characteristics of theevent and finding something positive is not just

a feature of our study As we noted earlier, thetypes of benefits people report finding (growth

in character, change in life perspective, andstrengthened relationships) are similar acrossmany kinds of trauma, including natural andhuman-made disasters, personal loss, and thethreat of death brought on by diagnosis of aterminal disease (e.g., McMillen, Smith, &

Fisher, 1997; Park et al., 1996; for reviews, see

Schaefer & Moos, 1992; Tedeschi & Calhoun,

1995; and Updegraff & Taylor, in press) This

suggests that benefit-finding has more to do

with characteristics of the individual than with

characteristics of the event.

In contrast to the benefit-finding results, the

ability to make sense of the loss was associated

with characteristics of the loss, particularly with

the age of the deceased (Davis et al., 1998)

Only 60% of respondents whose loved one was

relatively young (under 57 years of age) were

able to make sense of their loss by 6 months

after the loss In contrast, 87% of respondents

whose loved one was over 72 years of age were

able to make sense of their loss Similarly,

sev-eral bereavement researchers have suggested

that losses of young adults and children are

more likely to violate our assumptions about

the natural order of life—that the old should

die before the young (de Vries, Dalla Lana, &

Falk, 1994) Indeed, one reason the loss of a

child is perceived as more difficult to adjust to

than any other type of loss is because it is so

difficult to find any meaning in such losses (e.g.,

Craig, 1977; de Vries, Davis, Wortman, &

Leh-man, 1997; Miles & Crandall, 1983; Rubin,

1993; Sanders, 1980)

Religious beliefs appeared to help the

respon-dents find some meaning or understanding of

their loss (Davis et al., 1998; for similar results,

see McIntosh, Silver, & Wortman, 1993) Most

often, religious people made sense of their loss

by saying that God had needed or wanted their

family member or, more generally, that the

family member’s death was a part of God’s plan

Religious beliefs did not help people find

some-thing positive in their loss, however (Davis et

al., 1998) Thus, religious beliefs may provide

an explanation or rationale for why the death

happened, but they do not necessarily lead

peo-ple to find some benefit in their loss

The Psychological Consequences of

Finding Something Positive

As we noted earlier, the bereaved people who

were able to find something positive in their

loss showed better adjustment on indicators of

depressive symptoms, posttraumatic stress

symptoms, and positive affect (Davis et al.,

1998) The relationship between finding benefits

and adjustment held up over time, and indeed

became stronger as the time since the loss

in-creased When family members reported finding

something positive in their loss, there was apositive change in their reported levels of ad-justment, even when controlling for their priorlevels of adjustment Those family memberswho reported first finding benefits 13 monthsafter their loss showed even steeper changes inemotional adjustment than those who were able

to find benefits 6 months after the loss.The particular benefit respondents found intheir loss—whether it was through a gain inperspective, growth in their character, or astrengthening of relationships—did not influ-ence their adjustment (Davis et al., 1998).Rather, it was finding a benefit of any kind thatwas associated with better adjustment

It might be argued that finding somethingpositive is related to better adjustment only be-cause it is a proxy for dispositional optimism.Yet we found that the relationship betweenfinding something positive and adjustment re-mained significant when we controlled for re-spondents’ dispositional optimism (Davis et al.,1998) Indeed, finding something positive me-diated the relationship between dispositionaloptimism and adjustment This suggests thatdispositional optimism is a distal influence onadjustment that operates through the proximalmechanism of finding something positive Inother words, one reason dispositional optimistsare able to adjust better to a loss is because theyare more likely to find something positive in theloss

Not only do we see evidence that those citingbenefits tend to report less distress over time,but they become somewhat more optimisticover time (as measured by Scheier & Carver’s[1985] Life Orientation Test) The fact thatthese effects seem to grow stronger with timealso suggests that, at least for some people, thechanges that they are perceiving are beginning

to take root A year after the loss, some peopleare beginning to perceive themselves differentlyand to feel confident with these new perspec-tives This seems to be what Alicia (quoted inthis chapter’s epigraph) and several othersquoted throughout this chapter are trying tocommunicate

Implications and Conclusions

It might seem that our results hold few clues as

to how to intervene with and support grievingpeople Suggesting to someone who has lost aclose loved one that he or she should try to find

something positive in the loss could easily be

perceived as being unsupportive (see Tennen &

Affleck, 1999) Indeed, some of the comments

from family members and friends that bereaved

people find most unhelpful are those that try to

put a positive spin on the loss (Lehman, Ellard,

& Wortman, 1986) This is illustrated by a

com-ment made by Veronica, a woman in our study

whose elderly mother died after a long illness:

I got real angry when she died, but people

would tell me to look at the other side—she

had been just laying there, just wasting

away I got angry at that! (quoted in

Nolen-Hoeksema & Larson, 1999, p 88)

Based on the types of benefits that people do

say that they gain following a loss, however, we

can deduce some clues as to the supportive

in-terventions that may be helpful for some

be-reaved people First, many people say that the

loss has caused them to grow in character and

gain new skills Supportive interventions could

highlight this growth in an effort to enhance

the bereaved person’s self-esteem and sense of

self-efficacy For example, a friend might say to

a bereaved person, “I know this loss has caused

you tremendous pain I have been really

im-pressed at how hard you worked to make your

mother’s last days good ones You did things I

don’t think I could have done!” Similarly,

friends and others could point out how much

the bereaved person seems to have

grown—be-coming very thoughtful, sensitive, and so on—

as a result of the loss

Second, many bereaved people say they have

gained new perspectives on life as a result of

their loss Family members, friends, and

thera-pists could ask bereaved people about changes

in their perspective as a result of the loss The

answers they get will not always be positive—

sometimes the change in perspective will be a

negative one But when the change is a positive

one, this provides an opportunity for bolstering

the bereaved person’s esteem and

self-efficacy for coping

Third, many bereaved people say that the

strengthening of relationships is an important

benefit This suggests that the level and type of

support that family members and friends

pro-vide the bereaved person are crucial to the

per-son’s ability to find anything positive in the

loss Indeed, our study found people who had

high-quality emotional and practical support

from others were more likely to find something

positive in their loss (Nolen-Hoeksema & son, 1999) This is illustrated by a response toour question about finding benefit from Fran, awoman in our study whose cousin died of com-plications of AIDS:

Lar-We had incredible support from family andfriends, unbelievable from our church andour pastor And even school friends We an-ticipated some negative response to our car-ing for a person with AIDS, particularlywith children in our home, and nothingnegative was ever said to us during or since.That was quite amazing He was verytouched by the expressions of concern fromfriends of ours who would come in and visithim It was a very close time for my fam-ily, that is, my husband, children, and myparents My mother and I worked in tan-dem, and our relationship was altered as aresult of this We kind of emerged fromthis experience as peers We’re much closer.That has been absolutely wonderful (quoted

in Nolen-Hoeksema & Larson, 1999, p 84)The impact of any of the interventions wehave suggested may be small at first But theycan sow seeds that later lead bereaved persons

to be better able to internalize the promoting experiences that they have noted fol-lowing loss All interventions with bereavedpeople, however, need to begin with nonjudg-mental listening and appreciation for their pain,and an understanding that the process of grieftakes different amounts of time for differentpeople

growth-In conclusion, based on our research and eral other studies, we conclude that the majority

sev-of people who face a major trauma such as theloss of a loved one are able to find some benefit

in their experience, usually some way they havegrown, have gained perspective, or have en-hanced relationships with others This suggeststhat a focus on recovery from a loss to a pre-vious level of functioning misses the true pro-cess of change that many people experience fol-lowing a loss Rather than just expecting people

to “get back to normal” in their functioning, wecan begin to look for ways that traumas con-tribute to growth to new and higher levels offunctioning

Acknowledgments This work was supported

by U.S Public Health Grant 1 R01 MH43760

We thank the following hospices and home

health care agencies for recruiting participants

whose experiences are represented in this

man-uscript: Hospice of Contra Costa, Hospice

Car-ing Project of Santa Cruz County, Hospice of

Marin, Hospice of the Valley, Lifesource of

Larkspur and Mountain View, Mills-Peninsula

Hospital, Mission Hospice, Vesper Hospice,

Visiting Nurse Association of San Jose, and

Vis-iting Nurses and Hospice of San Francisco We

also thank Dr Judith Larson for running this

study and contributing to its development

References

Affleck, G., & Tennen, H (1996) Construing

ben-efits from adversity: Adaptational significance

and dispositional underpinnings Journal of

Per-sonality, 64, 899–922.

Antonovsky, A (1987) Unraveling the mystery of

health San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Calhoun, L G., & Tedeschi, R G (1990) Positive

aspects of critical life problems: Recollections of

grief Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 20,

265–272

Collins, R L., Taylor, S E., & Skokan, L A

(1990) A better world or a shattered vision?

Changes in life perspective following

victimiza-tion Social Cognition, 8, 263–285.

Craig, Y (1977) The bereavement of parents and

their search for meaning British Journal of

So-cial Work, 7, 41–54.

Davis, C G., Lehman, D R., & Wortman, C B

(2000) Finding meaning in loss and trauma:

Making sense of the literature Manuscript

sub-mitted for publication

Davis, C G., & Nolen-Hoeksema, S (2001) Loss

and meaning: How do people make sense of

loss? American Behavioral Scientist, 44, 726–

741

*Davis, C G., Nolen-Hoeksema, S., & Larson, J

(1998) Making sense of loss and benefiting

from the experience: Two construals of

mean-ing Journal of Personality and Social

Psychol-ogy, 75, 561–574.

Davis, C G., Wortman, C B., Lehman, D R., &

Silver, R C (2000) Searching for meaning in

loss: Are clinical assumptions correct? Death

Studies, 24, 497–540.

de Vries, B., Dalla Lana, R., & Falk, V T (1994)

Parental bereavement over the life course: A

theoretical intersection and empirical review

Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 29, 47–69.

de Vries, B., Davis, C G., Wortman, C B., &

Leh-man, D R (1997) Long-term psychological and

somatic consequences of later life parental

be-reavement Omega: Journal of Death and

Frankl, V E (1962) Man’s search for meaning:

An introduction to logotherapy Boston: Beacon.

(Original work published 1959)

Frankl, V E (1986) The doctor and the soul: From

psychotherapy to logotherapy (3rd ed.) New

York: Vintage (Original work published 1955)

Heider, F (1958) The psychology of interpersonal

relations New York: Wiley.

*Janoff-Bulman, R (1992) Shattered assumptions:

Towards a new psychology of trauma New

York: Free Press

*Janoff-Bulman, R., & Frantz, C M (1997) Theimpact of trauma on meaning: From meaning-less world to meaningful life In M Power &

C R Brewin (Eds.), The transformation of

meaning in psychological therapies (pp 91–

106) New York: Wiley

Kelley, H H (1972) Attribution in social action In E E Jones, D E Kanouse, H H Kel-ley, R E Nisbett, S Valins, & B Weiner (Eds.),

inter-Attribution: Perceiving the causes of behavior

(pp 1–26) Morristown, NJ: General LearningPress

Lehman, D R., Davis, C G., DeLongis, A., man, C B., Bluck, S., Mandel, D R., & Ellard,

Wort-J H (1993) Positive and negative life changesfollowing bereavement and their relations to ad-

justment Journal of Social and Clinical

Psy-chology, 12, 90–112.

Lehman, D R., Ellard, J H., & Wortman, C B.(1986) Social support for the bereaved: Recipi-ents’ and providers’ perspectives on what is

helpful Journal of Consulting and Clinical

Psy-chology, 54, 438–446.

Lerner, M J (1980) The belief in a just world.

New York: Plenum

Lund, D A., Caserta, M S., & Dimond, M F.(1993) The course of spousal bereavement inlater life In M S Stroebe, W Stroebe, & R O

Hansson (Eds.), Handbook of bereavement: A

sourcebook of research and intervention

(pp 240–254) London: Cambridge UniversityPress

Malinak, D P., Hoyt, M F., & Patterson, V.(1979) Adults’ reactions to the death of a par-

ent: A preliminary study American Journal of

McIntosh, D N., Silver, R C., & Wortman, C B.

(1993) Religion’s role in adjustment to a

neg-ative life event: Coping with the loss of a child

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,

65, 812–821.

McMillen, J C., Smith, E M., & Fisher, R H

(1997) Perceived benefit and mental health after

three types of disaster Journal of Consulting

and Clinical Psychology, 65, 733–739.

Miles, M S., & Crandall, E K B (1983) The

search for meaning and its potential for affecting

growth in bereaved parents Health Values, 7,

19–23

Nolen-Hoeksema, S., & Davis, C G (1999)

Thanks for sharing that: Ruminators and their

social support networks Journal of Personality

and Social Psychology, 77, 801–814.

Nolen-Hoeksema, S., & Larson, J (1999) Coping

with loss Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Nolen-Hoeksema, S., Parker, L E., & Larson, J

(1994) Ruminative coping with depressed mood

following loss Journal of Personality and Social

Psychology, 67, 92–104.

*Park, C L., Cohen, L H., & Murch, R L (1996)

Assessment and prediction of stress-related

growth Journal of Personality, 64, 71–105.

Rubin, S S (1993) The death of a child is forever:

The life course impact of child loss In M S

Stroebe, W Stroebe, & R O Hansson (Eds.),

Handbook of bereavement: A sourcebook of

re-search and intervention (pp 285–299) London:

Cambridge University Press

Sanders, C M (1980) A comparison of adult

be-reavement in the death of a spouse, child, and

parent Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 10,

303–322

Schaefer, J A., & Moos, R H (1992) Life crisis

and personal growth In B N Carpenter (Ed.),

Personal coping: Theory, research, and

appli-cation (pp 149–170) Westport, CT: Praeger.

Scheier, M F., & Carver, C S (1985) Optimism,

coping, and health: Assessment and implications

of generalized outcome expectancies Health

Psychology, 4, 219–247.

Snyder, C R (1994) The psychology of hope: You

can get there from here New York: Free Press.

Snyder, C R (2000) The hope mandala: Coping

with the loss of a loved one In J Gillham (Ed.),

Optimism and hope (pp 124–148) Radnor, PA:

Templeton Foundation

Snyder, C R., Cheavens, J., & Michael, S T

(1999) Hoping In C R Snyder (Ed.), Coping:

The psychology of what works (pp 205–227).

New York: Oxford University Press

*Taylor, S E (1983) Adjusting to threatening

events: A theory of cognitive adaptation

Amer-ican Psychologist, 38, 1161–1173.

Taylor, S E (1989) Positive illusions: Creative

self-deception and the healthy mind New York:

Basic Books

Taylor, S E., & Armor, D A (1996) Positive

il-lusions and coping with adversity Journal of

Personality, 64, 873–898.

Taylor, S E., Kemeny, M E., Reed, G M., & pinwall, L G (1991) Assault on the self: Posi-tive illusions and adjustment to threatening

As-events In J Strauss & G R Goethals (Eds.), The

self: Interdisciplinary approaches (pp 239–254).

New York: Springer-Verlag

*Tedeschi, R G., & Calhoun, L G (1995) Trauma

and transformation: Growing in the aftermath

of suffering Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Tedeschi, R G., & Calhoun, L G (1996) ThePosttraumatic Growth Inventory: Measuring

the positive legacy of trauma Journal of

Trau-matic Stress, 9, 455–471.

*Tennen, H., & Affleck, G (1999) Finding benefits

in adversity In C R Snyder (Ed.), Coping: The

psychology of what works (pp 279–304) New

York: Oxford University Press

Thompson, S C., & Janigian, A S (1988) Lifeschemes: A framework for understanding the

search for meaning Journal of Social and

Clin-ical Psychology, 7, 260–280.

Updegraff, J A., & Taylor, S E (in press) Fromvulnerability to growth: Positive and negativeeffects of stressful life events In J Harvey and

E Miller (Eds.), Handbook of loss and trauma.

New York: Bruner/Mazel

Yalom, I D., & Lieberman, M A (1991)

Bereave-ment and heightened existential awareness,

The Pursuit of Meaningfulness in Life

Roy F Baumeister & Kathleen D Vohs

Human beings begin life as animals and remain

tied throughout life to natural cyles of birth and

death, eating and sleeping, reproduction, danger

and safety, and more Yet to this natural

di-mension of human life must be added a cultural

one Humans use their thinking capacity to

transcend their immediate environment and

their natural urges and responses Thinking

usually involves meaning, as in the use of

lan-guage, symbols, and connections between

con-cepts Whereas natural law depends on the

prin-ciples of physics, chemistry, and biology,

culture rests on language and meaning Hence,

an account of the human being that neglected

meaning would miss much that is essential and,

indeed, much that is distinctively human

Psychologists gradually have begun to study

meaning in life Frankl’s (1959/1976) early

work emphasized the importance of finding

value in life, and he is widely credited with

be-ing a pioneer in the study of meanbe-ing His work

constituted a courageous rebellion against the

behaviorist and psychodynamic paradigms that

dominated psychological theorizing at that time

Another important work in the history of the

study of meaning was Klinger’s (1977) book

Meaning and Void, which emphasized the

im-portance of purposes for conferring meaning on

life Still, these works were isolated

intellectu-ally from the main work of their time In amore recent edited volume by Wong and Fry(1998), however, there are many different au-thors with broad and multifaceted interests inthe human quest for meaning and its implica-tions for psychological functioning Clearly,there appears to be more attention given tomeaning in psychological theorizing

The Nature of Meaning

The essence of meaning is connection Meaningcan link two things even if they are physicallyseparate entities, such as if they belong to thesame category, are owned by the same person,

or are both used for a common goal The nection between the two is not part of theirphysical makeup and thus can only be appreci-ated by a human mind (or some other mindcapable of processing meaning) Ultimately,therefore, meaning is a nonphysical reality It

is real in that it can have genuine causal sequences, and yet it cannot be reduced to phys-ical principles

con-Money provides one of the best illustrations

of the nonphysical reality of meaning A dollarbill certainly has a physical reality as a scrap ofgreen paper with a certain molecular structure

But no amount of analyzing that molecular

structure will reveal what that dollar bill has in

common with 10 dimes or 4 quarters It is only

in terms of meaning that this dollar bill is the

same as the 10 dimes Moreover, that meaning

links the particular dollar bill to many other

bills in far-off places, all of which are defined as

having exactly the same value, even though the

price of bread or gasoline may vary from place

to place

Furthermore, it should be noted that a great

deal of money does not exist in physical form

If all the existing American bills and coins were

accumulated in one pile, they would add up to

less than a third of the total American monetary

system Much of America’s money exists only

in the form of abstract representations For

ex-ample, if you have a bank account, the bank

theoretically holds some of your money In fact,

however, the bank does not stockpile a stack of

bills and coins that constitutes your money (or

the money of anyone, for that matter) In the

old “bank runs,” the rumor that a bank would

run out of money would cause people to hurry

to ask the bank to give them their savings in

cash, and the bank did not have enough cash to

satisfy that demand As another example, many

purchases are made by check or credit card, and

no actual coins or bills are used These

trans-actions are not physical events that can be fully,

adequately explained in terms of atomic,

molec-ular, chemical, or biological processes

In contrast, life is a biological process that can

be fully explained in physical terms (except

in-sofar as its course is changed by meaning—such

as if someone moves to a new country in

pur-suit of religious freedom) Human life is bound

by the rules of natural law, and, as such, the

basic animal needs continue to exert a powerful

influence on human activity

A seeming paradox in the concept of a

mean-ing of life is that meanmean-ing is stable whereas life

is malleable Because meaning must be shared

by many people, language is only usable in

so-ciety if the meanings of words remain largely

constant over time If half the people in your

town started saying “no” when they meant

“yes,” whereas the others continued to use

“yes” to mean “yes,” chaos would ensue

Like-wise, your address, social security number,

membership in a family, and other meanings

that define you are inherently stable, except for

well-established procedures for changing them

(such as when you sell your house and move to

another) The way that people understand

highly abstract concepts such as justice or triotism can evolve slowly in periods of socialchange, but even then some continuity is usu-ally necessary, and most of the meanings in thelanguage will remain stable

pa-Life, in contrast, is characterized by ongoingchange Growth, decline, ingesting food, elimi-nating waste, reproducing, and other naturalparts of life all involve change Your physicalbeing is constantly in flux, even if your mean-ingful identity as defined by society remains es-sentially the same

A meaning of life is therefore an imposition

of a stable conception onto a changing biologicalprocess This may seem quixotic, as if one weretrying to pin a stable definition onto a movingtarget Yet there probably is a deeper reason forthe contrast between the stability of meaningand the flux of life Although life is marked byconstant change, living things strive for stabil-ity Change is not welcome to most livingthings, and almost anyone who has lived withanimals can attest to their pronounced prefer-ence for stable, predictable routines and envi-ronments Rick Snyder, the senior editor of thisvolume, told us a relevant story about his 25-year-old parrot named Norman, who recentlywas moved to a new and much nicer cage WhenNorman was let out of his new cage for the firsttime, he went into a shrieking tantrum and de-stroyed a nearby cloth chair

Thus, meaning can be regarded as one of manity’s tools for imposing stability on life.The human organism is exposed to change butdesires stability, and it turns to meaning to helpcreate that stability For example, sexual attrac-tion and emotional intimacy wax and wane, andlong-term relationships are a process of ongoingadaptation and mutual evolution Yet this seem-ing instability is counteracted by imposing astable meaning, namely, marriage The act ofmarriage is not a physical event in the sensethat the atoms and molecules of someone’s bodyundergo a change, but the wedding does estab-lish certain lasting meanings (such as who hasthe right to have sexual relations with whom),and these provide a stable framework for defin-ing how two people are connected to each other.Thus, the marital link promotes a more stablerelationship even in the context of changingemotions and sexual desires

hu-Another important aspect of meaning is that

it has multiple levels, and indeed most eventscan be described at multiple levels Drawing onworks pertaining to the philosophy of action,

Vallacher and Wegner (1985, 1987) explicated

how people’s behaviors and experiences are

al-tered by shifting among different levels of

meaning Low levels involve concrete,

immedi-ate, and specific meanings, whereas high levels

invoke long time spans and broad concepts For

example, the activity of walking to school can

be described in low-level terms as a sequence of

leg movements and other physical events It can

be described at medium levels of meaning such

as going to school At high levels of meaning,

it can be described as part of the process of

get-ting an education and advancing one’s life Each

of these meanings is equally correct

As shown in the research studies by

Val-lacher and Wegner (1985, 1987), the different

levels have different consequences and

impli-cations People who are aware of their activities

at low levels of meaning are quite amenable to

influence and change In contrast, people who

are aware of their activities at high levels of

meaning are able to guide them by intelligent

reference to values and principles Low levels of

meaning focus on specifics and details, whereas

high levels of meaning make connections across

time and to broad goals When people encounter

difficulties or problems, they “shift down”

be-cause these lower levels of meaning seem to

fa-cilitate solving problems and making changes

When things are going well, they shift to

higher levels The very shift upward to a higher

level of meaning is typically experienced as a

very positive event that brings satisfaction and

pleasure This last point—the increase in

satis-faction that comes from moving to high levels

of meaning—is especially relevant to positive

psychology Increases in level of meaning do

more than help one escape from suffering: They

also enhance positive satisfaction and the sense

of fulfillment

Four Needs for Meaning

After reviewing evidence from several scholarly

fields, Baumeister (1991) concluded that the

quest for a meaningful life can be understood

in terms of four main needs for meaning These

constitute four patterns of motivation that

guide how people try to make sense of their

lives People who have satisfied all four of these

needs are likely to report finding their lives as

being very meaningful In contrast, people who

cannot satisfy one or more of these needs are

likely to report insufficient meaningfulness in

their lives

The first need is for purpose The essence ofthis need is that present events draw meaningfrom their connection with future events Thefuture events lend direction to the present sothat the present is seen as leading toward thoseeventual purposes Purposes can be sorted intotwo main types One is simply goals: an objec-tive outcome or state that is desired but not yetreal, and so the person’s present activities takemeaning as a way of translating the current sit-uation into the desired (future) one The otherform is fulfillments, which are subjective ratherthan objective Life can be oriented toward someanticipated state of future fulfillment, such asliving happily ever after, being in love, or going

to heaven

The second need is for values, which can lend

a sense of goodness or positivity to life and canjustify certain courses of action Values enablepeople to decide whether certain acts are right

or wrong, and, if people shape their actions bythese values, they can remain secure in the be-lief that they have done the right things,thereby minimizing guilt, anxiety, regret, andother forms of moral distress Frankl’s (1959/1976) influential discussion of life’s meaningemphasized value as the main form of meaningthat people needed Values are hierarchical, andeach question about whether something is good

or bad is typically answered by appealing to abroader level of abstraction and a principleabout what is good Ultimately, of course, theremust be some things that are good in and ofthemselves, without needing further justifica-

tion These can be called value bases

(Baumeis-ter, 1991) For example, many religious peoplebelieve that God’s will is a value base, insofar

as they regard it as supremely right and goodand do not hold that God serves some yethigher purpose

The third need is for a sense of efficacy Thisamounts to a belief that one can make a differ-ence A life that had purposes and values but noefficacy would be tragic: The person mightknow what was desirable but could not do any-thing with that knowledge It is relatively clearthat people seek control over their environ-ments (and over themselves; see Baumeister,1998), and a deep lack of control can provoke aserious personal crisis that can have a negativeimpact on physical and mental health

The fourth and last need is for a basis for worth Most people seek reasons for believingthat they are good, worthy persons Self-worthcan be pursued individually, such as by findingways of regarding oneself as superior to others

self-(see Wood, 1989) It also can be pursued

collec-tively, such as when people draw meaningful

self-esteem from belonging to some group or

category of people that they regard as worthy

(Turner, 1975)

It is popularly believed that people can find a

single source that will satisfy all their needs for

meaning Indeed, the colloquial question about

life’s meaning is usually phrased as if the

an-swer were singular: What is the meaning of

life? Empirically, however, people’s lives

usu-ally draw meaning from multiple sources,

in-cluding family and love, work, religion, and

various personal projects (Emmons, 1997)

Having multiple sources of meaning in life

protects the individual against meaninglessness

Even if family life turns bad and leads to divorce

and the dissolution of the family, for instance,

the person may still have work and religion to

furnish meaning Another benefit of having

multiple sources of meaning is that there is less

pressure for each of the sources to satisfy all

four sources of meaning For example, modern

work may offer many goals and a powerful

sense of efficacy but not much in the way of

value A person therefore may find that the

ca-reer is quite satisfying in some respects but fails

to yield a firm sense of what is right and wrong

Family life, however, may provide that very

sense of value (e.g., doing what is best for the

children is typically regarded as an important

good) that is not found in workplace activities

The Value Gap and the Self

The four needs for meaning can be used to

as-sess not only the meaning of individual lives

but even the meaningfulness throughout a

so-ciety Applying these four needs throughout a

society necessarily glosses over many important

variations among individuals Nevertheless,

Baumeister (1991) was able to draw some

gen-eral conclusions about how people succeed and

fail at finding meaning in modern life

Modern Western society seems reasonably

adept at satisfying three of the four needs for

meaning Of course, this is not to suggest that

all individuals are able to satisfy these needs In

general, however, the culture does offer

ade-quate and varied means of satisfying needs for

meaning

First, there are abundant purposes, especially

in the form of goals Throughout most of

hu-man history, most people have been farmers

and homemakers, which entailed doing work

that remained essentially the same year afteryear In the 20th century, however, the nature

of work changed so that more and more peoplehad careers, in the sense that their work livesprogressed through a series of different jobswith different responsibilities, tasks, and re-wards (see Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, &Tipton, 1985; Rodgers, 1978) The shift in thenature of work into being careers means thatpeople find a seemingly endless hierarchy or se-quence of goals that can structure their work.Fulfillments, the other form of purpose, alsoare offered in modern society, but there aresome recurring problems in the nature of ful-fillment that always have plagued secular ideals

of fulfillment For example, the idea of ment is that it will mark a permanent improve-ment in life—“living happily ever after”—whereas in reality most fulfillment states arerelatively short-lived Still, the pursuit of ful-fillment does form a central aspect of the mean-ing of many lives, and it can continually providemeaning across the life span

fulfill-In regard to the need for a sense of efficacy,there are several available routes in society to-day People can exert control in many ways and

on many levels Work, family, hobbies, teer work, and other pursuits typically offerabundant means of satisfying the quest for ef-ficacy

volun-Modern society also furnishes an appealingassortment of ways to establish self-worth Bothgroup and individual criteria for self-worth areavailable, and the diversity of pursuits andspheres means that nearly everyone probablycan find some way to be better than other peo-ple In contrast to the abundant options for sat-isfying the three needs for purpose, efficacy,and self-worth, modern society does not seem

to succeed as well at offering people a reliableand convincing set of values Moral discoursehas lost its bearings and foundations (Bellah etal., 1985), and Baumeister’s (1991) appraisalemphasized the “value gap” as the most wide-spread difficulty that people today have in find-ing meaning in life

One reason for this difficulty is the loss ofconsensus about values The very diversity andmultiplicity of endeavors in modern societyseems to frustrate the quest for solid values,even while it may facilitate the effort to satisfyother needs for meaning In order to toleratediversity, it is sometimes necessary to acceptthat other people’s values can be different thanone’s own, and this seems to make one’s ownvalues seem arbitrary or replaceable, which un-

dermines the assumptions on which values are

based (see Berger, 1967, on plausibility

struc-tures)

Another reason for the value gap is that the

transition to a modern society replaces

tradi-tional values with bureaucratic ratradi-tionality The

strong values that guided our ancestors, such as

tradition and religion, have been weakened

dur-ing the modernization of society, and no firm

values have replaced them The transition to

modern society is perhaps inherently

destruc-tive of certain value bases, and once a value base

is lost, it is difficult to revive or replace

(Ha-bermas, 1973)

The relative lack of firm, consensually

rec-ognized values—the value gap—is thus the

most common and socially pervasive problem in

the modern quest for a meaningful life The

other needs for meaning can be problematic for

many individuals, but at least society does offer

ample means of satisfying them Values in

par-ticular are the area in which society is least

helpful Indeed, the positive psychology

move-ment may be able to make a substantial

contri-bution to modern well-being and

meaningful-ness if it can help people with the process of

finding ways to see their lives as having value

The rising emphasis on self and identity in

the modern world can be viewed as a response

to the value gap Modern culture has elevated

the self to the status of serving as a basic value

People feel a moral obligation and an

entitle-ment to seek self-knowledge, to cultivate their

talents and fulfill their potentialities, and to do

what is best for their personal growth and

hap-piness This is a remarkable change from the

traditional moral system, which usually arrayed

moral injunctions against anything that was

self-serving Indeed, the restraint of selfish

pur-suits is arguably the essential core of previous

morality and the reason that morals emerged in

the first place Shifting the cultivation of self

from the enemy of moral values to one of the

staunchest bases of moral values is a

fundamen-tal and far-reaching realignment

Happiness and Suffering

A happy life and a meaningful life are not the

same thing For example, a terrorist or

revolu-tionary fighter may have an extremely

mean-ingful life, but it is not likely to be a very happy

one Baumeister (1991) reviewed extensive

ev-idence showing that having children reduces the

happiness and life satisfaction of parents, butthat this loss of happiness may be compensated

by an increase in meaningfulness (i.e., hood can help satisfy all four needs for mean-ing)

parent-It would be excessive to conclude from suchexamples, however, that happiness and mean-ingfulness are opposites or even that they arenegatively correlated In the majority of cases,more meaningful lives will be happier ones, andthe existential despair that accompanies a pro-found sense of meaninglessness is likely to beincompatible with lasting happiness

Probably the best way to reconcile these flicting signs with the weight of human expe-rience is to propose that meaning is necessarybut not sufficient for happiness People whocannot find meaning in life (i.e., who cannotsatisfy the needs for meaning), and whose livestherefore are experienced as severely lacking inmeaning, are probably unable to achieve hap-piness But meaningfulness is probably notenough to ensure happiness Meaning is a pre-requisite for happiness, but there also are othernecessary ingredients

con-Turning to the topic of suffering, it appears

to stimulate the needs for meaning (see meister, 1991) When people suffer some mis-fortune, they often cope with it by finding someform of meaning Giving meaning to the neg-ative life event may constitute a form of control,even if it has no practical value (e.g., Rothbaum,Weisz, & Snyder, 1982) For example, peoplewho suffer from chronic pain report feeling bet-ter if they are able to put a label on the pain so

Bau-as to define and explain it, even if that diagnosisentails that nothing can be done about it (Hil-bert, 1984) Simply having a label is comfortingand eases stress; in turn, this allows the person

to move on (see Snyder & Pulvers, 2001)

In her influential paper on how people copewith misfortune, Taylor (1983) demonstratedthe power of suffering to stimulate the needsfor meaning In her account, people cope withsuffering and misfortune by means of threegeneral strategies: finding purpose in it, rebuild-ing a sense of mastery or control, and bolsteringtheir self-worth These correspond to three ofthe four needs for meaning (i.e., purpose, effi-cacy, and self-worth) The fourth, for value,probably deserves to be included as well, be-cause when people believe that their sufferingserves some positive value, they can bear itmore easily Indeed, part of the long-standingappeal of Christian religion is that it confers

value on suffering for its own sake, insofar as

the sufferer is imitating Christ The symbolic

link between one’s own misfortune and the

suf-fering of the divine figure (“we all have our

crosses to bear,” in the revealing cliche)

trans-forms one’s suffering by conferring value and

thereby facilitating coping

Making Meaning

The term meaning-making refers to an active

process through which people revise or

re-appraise an event or series or events (e.g.,

Tay-lor, 1983) This reappraisal often involves

find-ing some positive aspect (such as the proverbial

silver lining) in a negative event The

transfor-mation process from adversity to prosperity has

been referred to as the benefit-finding aspect of

meaning-making (Davis, Nolen-Hoeksema, &

Larson, 1998) A second aspect of

meaning-making involves looking for attributions (e.g.,

that God intended for the event to occur) in an

effort to understand the event This aspect has

been referred to as the sense-making function

of meaning-making (Davis et al., 1998)

Meaning-making also has been defined as the

search for significance (Park & Folkman, 1997)

Park and Folkman (1997) distinguished between

the global and situational levels of

meaning-making Global meaning-making refers to the

establishment of a basic orientation, long-term

belief system, or set of valued goals

Situation-specific meaning-making refers to finding

meaning in a particular context or situation that

is congruent with one’s global meaning

struc-ture

It is tempting to imagine that all aspects of

human life evolved because they serve a

pur-pose and are part of a grand evolutionary plan

Evolutionary psychologists (Buss, Haselton,

Shackelford, Bleske, & Wakefield, 1998) and

neuroscientists, however, maintain that not all

human psychological and behavioral outcomes

are purposeful from an evolutionary

perspec-tive Nevertheless, the ability to create higher

order meaning from seemingly unrelated

stim-uli or events does seem to have been hardwired

into human brains Gazzaniga (e.g., 1993, 1997)

has proposed that part of the human brain is

designed specifically to interpret incoming

in-formation This so-called left brain interpreter

was first discovered in patients who had

split-brain surgery in which the bundle of fibers

con-necting the brain’s two hemispheres was

sev-ered; thus, each hemisphere no longer couldrelate information to the opposite hemisphere.Gazzaniga noticed that these patients’ verbal ac-counts of an event were supplemented with con-textual information that aided in making sense

of an event that only half of the brain knewabout In a famous example, Patient P.S wasshown different pictures to each half of herbrain and then asked to respond in variousways After her left hemisphere was flashed apicture of a chicken claw and her right hemi-sphere was flashed a picture of a snow scene,P.S was asked to choose from an array of pic-tures in front of her which object was related towhat she saw After (correctly) choosing thepicture of the chicken with her right hand andthe picture of the snow shovel with her lefthand, she was asked why she selected thoseitems She responded by saying, “The chickenclaw goes with the chicken, and you need ashovel to clean out the chicken shed” (Gazza-niga, 1993, p 253) The left hemisphere had ob-served the left hand’s selection and had inter-preted it with the contextual knowledge it had,which did not include the knowledge that theright hemisphere had seen a snow scene In sub-sequent investigations, there has been supportfor the theory that the left brain is hardwired

to produce a narrative reflection of the brain’sinputs

The seemingly universal development ofmeaningful interpretation also suggests that hu-man beings are hardwired to seek meaning Ka-gan (1981) observed how voraciously childrenseem to learn language, including the toddlerhabits of naming everything and narratingone’s own actions He concluded that humanbeings are innately predisposed to acquire anduse meaningful thought After all, children donot need to be forced or pressured to learn lan-guage—on the contrary, they generally pick it

up rapidly and eagerly, regardless of whetherparents encourage, discourage, or ignore theprocess (see also Snyder, 1994)

Research Methods for Studying Meaning-Making

Meaning-making has been explored throughseveral methodologies In general, these meth-ods share the basic assumption that meaning-making is idiosyncratic Often researchers studymeaning-making with interview methods (e.g.,Davis et al., 1998) The interviews are conducted

by trained professionals and may take place in

the context of a therapeutic session (e.g., Clarke,

1996) Interviews are advantageous because

they allow research participation by people who

are not able to convey information in written

form (e.g., after a physically limiting accident)

Additionally, interviews are open-ended and can

touch on a variety of topics, thereby allowing

for more depth and breadth of information

Researchers who study meaning-making

through writing have used a number of

ap-proaches Some researchers ask participants to

write a story or narrative on a specific topic,

whereas others ask participants to write their

life stories with no direction to content (e.g.,

Heatherton & Nichols, 1994; McAdams,

Dia-mond, de St Aubin, & Mansfield, 1997;

Pen-nebaker, 1993) The narrative method typically

involves asking people to write an account of an

event or period in their lives, such as a

trau-matic experience (Pennebaker, 1993) or

success-ful or failed attempts at life change (Heatherton

& Nichols, 1994) Life stories (e.g., McAdams,

1985) are in-depth descriptions of a person’s

whole life In research conducted by McAdams

and colleagues (e.g., McAdams, 1993; McAdams

et al., 1997), people are asked to look at their

life as a book with a title, chapters (significant

periods in life), and plot summaries The

advan-tage of written meaning-making

communica-tions is that they usually are constructed in a

linear fashion, allowing for a more cohesive

body of knowledge

Beyond the precaution that these methods

may restrict the demographics of participants, it

does appear that simply putting thoughts and

emotions into language facilitates one’s ability

to construct meaning (see Esterling, L’Abate,

Murray, & Pennebaker, 1999; see Niederhoffer

and Pennebaker, this volume)

Benefits of Making-Meaning

There is abundant evidence that engaging in

meaning-making has positive effects Benefits to

the self can occur because meaning-making

al-lows a person to establish his or her identity

and affirm self-worth (Baumeister & Wilson,

1996; McAdams, 1996) In addition, there are

physical and psychological health benefits to

finding meaning in life A consistent theme

throughout meaning-making research is that

the people who achieve the greatest benefits are

those who transform their perceptions of

cir-cumstances from being unfortunate to nate For example, transforming a bad event orundesirable set of circumstances into a positiveoutcome is the central theme of generative peo-ple—those who are concerned for and commit-ted to the well-being of future generations(McAdams et al., 1997)

fortu-McAdams (1996) noted that a life story can

be used to create, transform, solidify, or light important aspects of life Indeed, he pro-posed that personal identity can be establishedthrough the task of asking people to write a lifestory with one central theme This task provides

high-an opportunity to reflect on one’s purpose inlife, which, in turn, may guide future lifechoices Because accomplishments and goalsachieved can be featured as central events, cre-ating a life story can also boost one’s self-worth.Thus, creating a life story provides an oppor-tunity to bask in one’s accomplishments andalso to create a personal ideology

Researchers examining the mental and ical health effects of meaning-making consis-tently report that meaning-making is associatedwith positive health outcomes Pennebaker’s re-search on traumatic events indicates that evenshort writing sessions over 3 days can havewide-ranging effects This research has shownthat writing about emotional upheavals is re-lated to heightened immune system functioning(Pennebaker, Kiecolt-Glaser, & Glaser, 1988),fewer physical illnesses and physician visits(Pennebaker & Beall, 1986), and improved liverenzyme functioning (Francis & Pennebaker,1992) There is also evidence that this type ofwriting is related to improved academic perfor-mance (Pennebaker, Colder, & Sharp, 1990) andresumed employment after being unemployed(Spera, Buhrfeind, & Pennebaker, 1994).Indeed, the very meaning of Pennebaker’sfindings has shifted toward a greater emphasis

phys-on making meaning His early explanatiphys-ons forthe benefits of writing about traumatic eventswere based on the hunch that people wanted tocommunicate about their problems but activelyinhibited these impulses, and the inhibition it-self was considered to be a source of harm tothe body Subsequently, however, he has begun

to emphasize that writing or speaking about thetrauma was beneficial because it helped peoplemake sense of what they had suffered (Esterling

et al., 1999)

A powerful example of the effect of making on physical health is illustrated in re-search on HIV-positive men who recently had

meaning-experienced the loss of a close friend or lover to

AIDS (Bower, Kemeny, Taylor, & Fahey, 1998)

Interviews and physical health indices show that

between 2 and 3 years after the death, the

be-reaved people who engaged meaning-making

about their loss showed a less rapid decline in

CD4 T lymphocyte cells, a key immunological

marker of HIV progression

Mental health also is positively affected by

meaning-making People coping with the loss of

a family member show better adjustment if

they engage in meaning-making (Davis et al.,

1998) Specifically, Davis et al found that two

aspects of meaning-making—making sense of

the loss and finding something positive in the

experience—differentially predicted

psycholog-ical adjustment Up to 12 months after the loss,

making sense of the event predicted decreased

distress (i.e., psychological adjustment),

whereas at 13 to 18 months after the loss,

find-ing somethfind-ing positive predicted decreased

psy-chological distress (see Nolen-Hoeksema and

Davis, this volume)

Meaning-making has been studied in the

con-texts of psychotherapy and career burnout

Clarke (1996) and others reported that

meaning-making in the process of

psychother-apy was associated with more successful

out-comes In fact, some therapists explicitly use a

story or narrative metaphor to represent what

occurs in the therapy hour (see Neimeyer &

Stewart, 2000) This method has advantages for

both the therapist and the client, in that the

story metaphor provides a script to follow

Research on attitudes toward one’s career has

shown that attempts to find meanings in life are

related to career burnout (Pines, 1993) Pines

argued that, in American culture, career often

takes the place of religion in people’s lives,

which then compels people to find significance

in their work Because work does not easily lend

itself to existential significance, however,

rely-ing on career for meanrely-ing in life is associated

with career burnout

Meaning-making—or the lack thereof—has

been linked to a variety of cognitive and

emo-tional states For instance, an impoverishment

of meaning is associated with feeling emotional

dejection (e.g., sadness) but not agitation (van

Selm & Dittman-Kohli, 1998) Interestingly,

writing about a traumatic event, which is a form

of meaning-making that is strongly associated

with positive outcomes, leads to a surge in

neg-ative affect and a decrease in positive affect

im-mediately after writing about the event (see

Es-terling et al., 1999) After a period of severalweeks, however, people have experienced sig-nificantly less negative affect and more positiveaffect as a result of writing about the event

In addition to emotional changes, cognitionsand perceptions change as a result of meaning-making People attempting to find meaning of-ten undergo a period of rumination Rumina-tion has been conceptualized as a way to revisethe script of an event so as to acquire a newunderstanding of the experience (Silver, Boon,

& Stones, 1983; Tedeschi, 1999) In support ofthis theorization, King and Pennebaker (1996)found that, for a person facing a loss, rumina-tion may aid in resolving the loss (King & Pen-nebaker, 1996) Indeed, some theorists maintainthat cognitive changes are central to meaning-making (Esterling et al., 1999)

How Meaning Is Made

We now review the possible mechanismsthrough which meaning-making produces itseffects Researchers have found that writing(and to some extent talking) about an eventforces structure onto thoughts and feelings thatpreviously had not been clearly organized (Es-terling et al., 1999; King & Pennebaker, 1996).Language provides an opportunity to developnew insights and coping strategies Contentanalyses of written traumatic accounts revealedthat a growth in insight from the start of thewriting period to its end is most predictive oflater positive outcomes Similarly, a greaternumber of causal links and revelations of un-derstanding during the writing process also pre-dict psychological and physical benefits (Pen-nebaker & Francis, 1996)

In telling a story, both the background andthe ordering of events are important Similarly,

a story about one’s life includes not only theobjective facts but also the context in which theevents occurred Thus, the person is able toplace the story in a setting appropriate to itsoutcome or purpose (e.g., Heatherton & Nich-ols, 1994) In addition, McAdams (e.g., Mc-Adams et al., 1997) has found that generativepeople tend to write their stories in a particularorder, such that the story begins with a badevent or burden, which ultimately is trans-formed into a positive outcome In this way, theprotagonist triumphs over adversity, therebycreating a main character (self) who is strong,moral, and good

Although the empirical knowledge about the

process of making meaning is still in a very

early state of development, it seems reasonable

to speculate that the main way that

meaning-making achieves benefits involves imposing a

coherent structure on events and in particular

imposing a structure that is characterized by

movement from negative to positive

Importance for Positive Psychology

The study of making meaning began by

focus-ing on how meanfocus-ing can help people cope with

misfortune, trauma, and other bad events In

that respect, it conforms to the focus on the

negative that has been deplored by the

propo-nents of positive psychology Perhaps that

pat-tern and sequence were understandable On this

point, Baumeister, Vohs, Bratslavsky, and

Fin-kenauer (2000) have proposed that one general

principle of psychology is that bad is stronger

than good, and so it is hardly surprising that

early psychologists have focused on the bad

rather than the good (simply because they

wanted to begin work with the strongest

ef-fects)

In this chapter, however, we have contended

that meaning is powerful both for remedying

the bad and for enhancing the good True,

meaning is most urgently sought by victims

and sufferers, because the need to reduce

suf-fering takes precedence over most other human

motivations But that is only one side to the

story of meaning

Happiness, fulfillment, generativity, and

other forms of positive well-being are the

es-sential focus of positive psychology, and

mean-ing is integral to all of them Moreover, a

meaningful life is itself a highly positive

out-come As Ryff and Singer (1998) wrote,

“Pur-pose in life and personal growth are not

con-tributors to, but in fact defining features of

positive mental health” (p 216) The essential

contribution of positive psychology is to

em-phasize that the desirability of a meaningful

life goes beyond the fact that meaningfulness

reduces suffering Even in the absence of

suf-fering, trauma, pathology, or misfortune,

hu-man life will fall far short of its best potential

if it lacks meaning By understanding how

peo-ple seek and find meaning in their lives,

posi-tive psychology can enhance the human

expe-rience immensely

References Baumeister, R F (1991) Meanings of life New

York: Guilford

Baumeister, R F (1998) The self In D T Gilbert,

S T Fiske, & G Lindzey (Eds.), The handbook

of social psychology (4th ed., pp 680–740)

Bos-ton: McGraw-Hill

Baumeister, R F., Vohs, K D., Bratslavsky, E., &

Finkenauer, C (2000) Bad is stronger than

good Manuscript submitted for publication.

Baumeister, R F., & Wilson, B (1996) Life stories

and the four needs for meaning Psychological

Inquiry, 7, 322–325.

Bellah, R N., Madsen, R., Sullivan, W M.,

Swid-ler, A., & Tipton, S M (1985) Habits of the

heart: Individualism and commitment in ican life Berkeley: University of California

Amer-Press

Berger, P L (1967) The sacred canopy: Elements

of a sociological theory of religion Garden City,

NY: Doubleday Anchor

Bower, J E., Kemeny, M E., Taylor, S E., &Fahey, J L (1998) Cognitive processing, discov-ery of meaning, CD4 decline, and AIDS-relatedmortality among bereaved HIV-seropositive

men Journal of Consulting and Clinical

Clarke, K M (1996) Change processes in a

crea-tion of meaning event Journal of Consulting

and Clinical Psychology, 64, 465–470.

Davis, C G., Nolen-Hoeksema, S., & Larson, J.(1998) Making sense of loss and benefitingfrom the experience: Two construals of mean-

ing Journal of Personality and Social

Psychol-ogy, 75, 561–574.

Emmons, R A (1997) Motives and goals In R

Hogan, & J A Johnson (Eds.), Handbook of

personality psychology (p 485–512) San Diego,

CA: Academic Press

Esterling, B A., L’Abate, L., Murray, E J., & nebaker, J W (1999) Empirical foundations forwriting in prevention and psychotherapy: Men-

Pen-tal and physical health outcomes Clinical

Psy-chology Review, 19, 79–96.

Francis, M E., & Pennebaker, J W (1992) Puttingstress into words: The impact of writing onphysiological, absentee, and self-reported emo-

tional well-being measures American Journal

of Health Promotion, 6, 280–287.

Frankl, V E (1976) Man’s search for meaning.

New York: Pocket (Original work published1959)

Gazzaniga, M S (1993) Brain mechanisms and

conscious experience In Experimental and

the-oretical studies of consciousness: Ciba

Founda-tion Symposium (pp 247–262) Chichester,

En-gland: Wiley

Gazzaniga, M S (1997) Why can’t I control my

brain? In M Ito & Y Miyashita (Eds.),

Cogni-tion, computaCogni-tion, and consciousness (pp 69–

79) Oxford, England: Oxford University Press

Habermas, J (1973) Legitimation crisis (T

Mc-Carthy, Trans.) Boston: Beacon

Heatherton, T F., & Nichols, P A (1994)

Per-sonal accounts of successful versus failed

at-tempts at life change Personality and Social

Psychology Bulletin, 20, 664–675.

Hilbert, R A (1984) The accultural dimensions of

chronic pain: Flawed reality construction and the

problem of meaning Social Problems, 31, 365–

378

Kagan, J (1981) The second year: The emergence

of self awareness Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press

King, L A., & Pennebaker, J W (1996) Thinking

about goals, glue, and the meaning of life In

R S Wyer (Ed.), Advances in social cognition

(Vol 9, pp 97–106) Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum

Klinger, E (1977) Meaning and void: Inner

ex-perience and the incentives in people’s lives.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

McAdams, D P (1985) Power, intimacy, and the

life story: Personological inquiries into identity.

New York: Guilford

McAdams, D P (1993) The stories we live by:

Personal myths and the making of the self New

York: Morrow

McAdams, D P (1996) Personality, modernity,

and the storied self: A contemporary framework

for studying persons Psychological Inquiry, 7,

295–321

McAdams, D P., Diamond, A., de St Aubin, E., &

Mansfield, E (1997) Stories of commitment:

The psychosocial construction of generative

lives Journal of Personality and Social

Psy-chology, 72, 678–694.

Neimeyer, R A., & Stewart, A E (2000)

Con-structivist and narrative psychotherapies In

C R Snyder & R E Ingram (Eds.), Handbook

of psychological change (pp 337–357) New

York: Wiley

Park, C L., & Folkman, S (1997) Meaning in the

context of stress and coping Review of General

Psychology, 1, 115–144.

Pennebaker, J W (1993) Putting stress into

words: Health, linguistic, and therapeutic

impli-cations Behavioral Research and Therapy, 31,

539–548

Pennebaker, J W., & Beall, S K (1986)

Confront-ing a traumatic event: Toward an understandConfront-ing

of inhibition and disease Journal of Abnormal

Psychology, 95, 274–281.

Pennebaker, J W., Colder, M., & Sharp, L K

(1990) Accelerating the coping process Journal

of Personality and Social Psychology, 58, 528–

537

Pennebaker, J W., & Francis, M E (1996).Cognitive, emotional, and language processes in

disclosure Cognition and Emotion, 10, 601–626.

Pennebaker, J W., Kiecolt-Glaser, J., & Glaser, R.(1988) Disclosure of traumas and immune func-tion: Health implications for psychotherapy

Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology,

DC: Taylor and Francis

Rodgers, D T (1978) The work ethic in industrial

America 1850–1920 Chicago: University of

Chicago Press

Rothbaum, F., Weisz, J R., & Snyder, S S (1982).Changing the world and changing the self: A

two-process model of perceived control Journal

of Personality and Social Psychology, 42, 5–37.

Ryff, C D., & Singer, B (1998) The role of pose in life and personal growth in positive hu-

pur-man health In P Wong & P Fry (Eds.), The

human quest for meaning (pp 213–236)

Snyder, C R (1994) The psychology of hope: You

can get there from here New York: Free Press.

Snyder, C R., & Pulvers, K M (2001) Dr Seuss,the coping machine, and “Oh, the places you

will go.” In C R Snyder (Ed.), Coping and

cop-ers: Adaptive processes and people (pp 3–29).

New York: Oxford University Press

Spera, S., Buhrfeind, E., & Pennebaker, J W

(1994) Expressive writing and job loss

Acad-emy of Management Journal, 37, 722–733.

Taylor, S E (1983) Adjustment to threatening

events: A theory of cognitive adaptation