Resilience, Recovery, Positivity and Flourishing

Resilience, Recovery, Positivity and Flourishing

Sam Goldstein, Ph.D.
January, 2006
Copyright © 2006

In 1989 when government troops attacked seven-year-old Alephonsion Deng's village in the Sudan, his world dramatically changed. Alephonsion recalls running barefoot and naked into the night and joining thousands of other youth trying to escape death or slavery. For the next five years, Alephonsion wandered, not as the Israelites did with hope of finding the promised land, but truly lost without direction. His only purpose was to remain alive. Alephonsion existed on wild vegetables and drank whatever was available, even urine.

Alephonsion finally made it to a refugee camp in Kenya where he lived nearly a decade as an orphan, surviving on the meager food provided and what he foraged. He attended school at the orphanage. With great luck he was chosen along with a few other thousand orphans by the office of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees to immigrate to the United States.

In a Newsweek article (October 31, 2005), Alephonsion writes that he has had to learn to live with peace. In America, he was provided with housing and work as well as the opportunity to continue his education. He writes that knew how to challenge a hyena or catch a rabbit but had never turned on a light or used a telephone. His existence in his first two years in the United States was a "cloud of anger and depression." He struggled to forget the sounds of guns or the cries of women and children. Alephonsion writes that "for so many years the smell and taste of death had spread within me like poison."

But in the last two years, Alephonsion has come to accept and recognize that he can move on with his life. He can't identify the exact turning point in his emotions but has found that sharing his feelings with others, speaking to community groups and writing his memoirs has helped lessen his pain and suffering. He writes "now I am a man with the seeds of love, dignity and hope in his heart."

Alephonsion's survival is a testament to his dogged perseverance; not to just live or exist but to grow and flourish. Numerous scientific studies of children facing great adversity in their lives support the importance of resilience as a powerful force. The concept of resilience and the processes it entails explains why some children overcome seemingly inescapable obstacles, finding happiness and satisfaction in adulthood while others become victims of their early experiences and environments. Alephonsion and children from his part of the world are not alone in demonstrating this process. Resilience processes are not only effective but can be applied as demonstrated in the recovery to near normal functioning found in children adopted from institutional settings whose lives were characterized by deprivation, such as those raised in Romanian orphanages.
Over the past ten years, my colleague and I, Dr. Robert Brooks, as well as others have significantly expanded and extended the concept of resilience as a protective power for all and a formative influence on children. Parallel with the resilience research, has been the work of individuals such as Barbara Fredrickson and Marcel Lasada on flourishing. Flourishing is defined as living within an optimal range of human functioning. Such a range denotes goodness, growth and resilience. As in the resilience field, questions have been asked and efforts are focused on defining the variables that predict whether people will flourish or languish. As with the field of resilience, it is unclear if these predictors are idiosyncratic to the individual, a particular relationship or to larger groups. In the case of flourishing, the affective texture of a person's life, that is their emotional state and attitudes, or that of a particular relationship or group, can be represented by a positivity ratio. Such a ratio reflects the individual's level of pleasant feelings and sentiments to unpleasant ones over time. This ratio appears to predict subjective well-being. When this ratio is met or exceeded, individuals, relationships and even groups flourish.

Although both positive and negative affect can produce adaptive and maladaptive outcomes, a wide spectrum of evidence documents the powerful adaptive value of positive affect. Beyond their pleasant subjective feel, positive emotions, moods and sentiments appear to carry multiple benefits. These include the fact that good feelings alter people's mindset, including widening the scope of attention, broadening behavioral repertoires, increasing intuition and creativity. Further, good feelings alter bodily systems, including frontal brain asymmetry and immune function. Third, good feelings predict diverse positive outcomes including resistence to adversity, increased happiness, psychological growth, lower levels of cortisol, reduced inflammatory response to stress, reduction in daily pain and even reduction in stroke. Fourth, taken in combination, positivity, resilience and flourishing demonstrate that good feelings predict how long people live. Several well-controlled longitudinal studies document the clear link between frequent positive emotions and longevity.

But is there a critical positivity ratio? What percentage of positive to negative thoughts must one have to endure the daily stresses of life? Has that ratio changed as the stress and demands of every day life has increased over the past twenty years? Drs. Fredrickson and Lasada report that across individuals and even groups, flourishing and resilience is associated with a positivity ratio above 2.9. Taken simply, that means three positive thoughts for every negative thought during the course of the day. These thoughts can reflect self-acceptance, purpose in life, mastery, positive relationships with others, personal growth and autonomy. They can also reflect social acceptance, contributions and helping others and being connected. All of these are part of the resilience model Dr. Brooks and I believe in strongly.

Flourishing research also finds that the relationship of positive to negative thoughts is not a simple calculation. That is, some positive emotions may weigh more or less than others. Some negative emotions as well. Thus, not every emotion is equal in creating a positivity ratio. Readers interested in reading more about compiling a positivity ratio are directed to an article authored by Drs. Fredrickson and Lasada in the October, 2005 issue of the American Psychologist.

Positive emotions include amusement, awe, compassion, contentment, gratitude, hope, interest, joy, love, pride and sexual desire. Negative emotions include anger, contempt, disgust, embarrassment, fear, guilt, sadness and shame. What is your positivity ratio? How often during the course of the day do you experience a higher ratio of positive versus negative emotions? Developing an understanding of this pattern may lead to a better understanding of your daily life and a path towards improved emotional functioning.

It may be that human flourishing and resilience can be represented by a mathematical equation. Optimal human functioning and flourishing appears to be characterized by happiness and satisfaction, an umbrella of goodness, behavioral flexibility, direction towards mastery and personal growth, and connections to others. The equation is far from simple and complex to implement. What is your positivity ratio?