Title: A psychology of human strengths: Fundamental questions and future directions for a positive psychology. Author(s): Aspinwall, Lisa G., (Ed), Department of Psychology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, US. Staudinger, Ursula M., (Ed), Department of Psychology IV, Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany. Publisher Washington, DC, US: American Psychological Association, 2003. xvi, 369 pp. Information: ISBN: 1-55798-931-1 Link to this http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=pzh&jid=200304757&site=ehost- Publication: live Publication Edited Book Type: Subjects: Positive Psychology Language: English Abstract: In A Psychology of Human Strengths: Fundamental Questions and Future Directions for a Positive Psychology, leading scholars of contemporary psychology set a research agenda for the scientific study of human strengths. Aspinwall and Staudinger feature contributors who bring both supportive and challenging voices to this emerging field to stimulate discourse. In many cases, their findings have turned "established wisdom" on its head. What results is a comprehensive book that provides a forward-looking forum for the discussion of the purpose, pitfalls, and future of the psychology of human strengths. This volume offers commentary on positive psychology and its antecedents. It is a must-read for those looking for new ways of thinking about such topics as intelligence, judgment, volition, social behavior, close relationships, development, aging, and health as well as applications to psychotherapy, education, organizational psychology, gender, politics, creativity, and other realms of life. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved) Table of Contents: Contributors Preface Introduction A psychology of human strengths: Some central issues of an emerging field Lisa G. Aspinwall and Ursula M. Staudinger / 9-22 Human strengths as the orchestration of wisdom and selective optimization with compensation Paul B. Baltes and Alexandra M. Freund / 23-35 The human's greatest strength: Other humans Ellen Berscheid / 37-47 Constructive cognition, personal goals, and the social embedding of personality Nancy Cantor / 49-60 A conception of personality for a psychology of human strengths: Personality as an agentic, self-regulating system Gian Vittorio Caprara and Daniel Cervone / 61-74 Human aging: Why is even good news taken as bad? Laura L. Carstensen and Susan T. Charles / 75-86 Three human strengths Charles S. Carver and Michael F. Scheier / 87-102 The malleability of sex differences in response to changing social roles Alice H. Eagly and Amanda B. Diekman / 103-115 Toward a positive psychology: Social developmental and cultural contributions Nancy Eisenberg and Vivian Ota Wang / 117-129 Light and dark in the psychology of human strengths: The example of psychogerontology Rocío Fernández-Ballesteros / 131-147 Intervention as a major tool of a psychology of human strengths: Examples from organizational change and innovation Dieter Frey, Eva Jonas and Tobias Greitemeyer / 149-164 Judgmental heuristics: Human strengths or human weaknesses? Dale Griffin and Daniel Kahneman / 165-178 Positive affect as a source of human strength Alice M. Isen / 179-195 The parametric unimodel of human judgment: A fanfare to the common thinker Arie W. Kruglanski, Hans-Peter Erb, Scott Spiegel and Antonio Pierro / 197-210 Turning adversity to advantage: On the virtues of the coactivation of positive and negative emotions Jeff T. Larsen, Scott H. Hemenover, Catherine J. Norris and John T. Cacioppo / 211- 225 A holistic person approach for research on positive development David Magnusson and Joseph L. Mahoney / 227-243 Harnessing willpower and socioemotional intelligence to enhance human agency and potential Walter Mischel and Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton / 245-256 The motivational sources of creativity as viewed from the paradigm of positive psychology Jeanne Nakamura and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi / 257-269 Ironies of the human condition: Well-being and health on the way to mortality Carol D. Ryff and Burton Singer / 271-287 Political symbols and collective moral action David O. Sears / 289-303 Positive clinical psychology Martin E. P. Seligman and Christopher Peterson / 305-317 Driven to despair: Why we need to redefine the concept and measurement of intelligence Robert J. Sternberg / 319-329 The ecology of human strengths Daniel Stokols / 331-343 Author index Subject index About the editors A PSYCHOLOGY OF HUMAN STRENGTHS: SOME CENTRAL ISSUES OF AN EMERGING FIELD LISA G. ASPINWALL AND URSULA M. STAUDINGER A growing number of scholars in psychology are interested in inves- tigating positive aspects of well-being and health, rather than negative aspects such as distress and disease (for reviews, see Ickovics & Park, 1998; Ryff & Singer, 1998; Seligman & Czikszentmihalyi, 2000). Arguing that scientific psychology has focused disproportionately on pathology and re- pair, Seligman and Czikszentmihalyi recently issued a broader call for the study of strengths and prevention, as well as the individual, community, and societal factors that “make life worth living.” In the history of psy- chological science, this interest in salutogenesis (Antonovsky, 1987), men- tal health rather than mental illness (Jahoda, 1958), and maturity and growth (e.g., Erikson, 1959) is certainly not new. The current revival, how- ever, may be of a larger scale (and possibly greater impact) than ever before. Thus, the field may be at a critical juncture for revisiting and redefining some central issues in the understanding of human strengths. Our goal in this volume is to generate critical discourse on different ways the study of human strengths might progress. In this chapter, we highlight several questions and issues that we believe will be important to 9 the development of a field of human strengths. In doing so, we draw on lessons learned from our respective research programs on optimism and coping with adversity (LGA) and wisdom, resilience, and lifespan devel- opment (UMS), as well as some more general observations about this emerging field. This list of questions and issues we address in this chapter is not intended to be comprehensive, but rather to stimulate discussion and provide some guiding perspectives when reading the other chapters included in this volume. THE DIFFICULTY OF DEFINING HUMAN STRENGTHS One of the reasons that the repair and healing approach in psychology historically has been predominant seems to be a value issue. It is much easier to define the desired or adaptive direction of change if the goal of such change is to restore an earlier or a “normal” state. It is much more difficult to define a human strength if one considers psychological changes other than return to prior levels of functioning. Relatively speaking, dif- ferent areas of psychological functioning may involve more or less difficulty making such determinations (e.g., Staudinger, Marsiske, & Baltes, 1995). For instance, with regard to cognitive functioning, it seems rather obvious that solving a problem quickly is better than solving it slowly, but how would this logic be applied to such concepts as personality growth or suc- cessful aging? If psychologists are interested in assessing more than return to prior functioning, we are faced with several difficult sets of questions. For ex- ample, do we determine which characteristics represent a human strength vis-&vis their adaptiveness or functionality? And if so, how then do we operationalize adaptiveness or functionality? Do we use subjective (e.g., subjective well-being) or objective (e.g., longevity) indicators? Should we consult ethical or value systems, such as the seven primary virtues of Chris- tian ethics or the Aristotelian ethos composed of selection and sagacity? If so, why these, and not others? And whose standpoint should be used to decide what is good or optimal? For example, should we assess perceptions of improvement or change from the perspective of the person, or of those with whom he or she interacts, or of experts or of lay people? These normative issues need to be discussed and settled when study- ing human strengths. As research on resilience has demonstrated (e.g., Rutter & Rutter, 1993; Staudinger et al., 1995), objective and subjective criteria often result in very different ideas about what is functional or adap- tive; therefore, it seems that both kinds of criteria may need to be consid- ered and would ideally be balanced when drawing conclusions about what is a human strength. The approach taken in the study of wisdom-a pro- totypical human strength with a long cultural history-may provide some 10 ASPINWALL AND STAUDlNGER guidance. Defining functionality as balancing one’s own good and the good of others-one of the core definitional features of wisdom (e.g., see Baltes & Staudinger, 2000; Sternberg, 1998)-may solve some of the value prob- lems involved when studying human strengths. This definition of wisdom combines objective (“the good of others”) and subjective (“one’s own good”) criteria and at the same time does not prescribe what that “good” is. Rather, the definition is placed on a meta-level. The decision about when this balance between one’s own good and the good of others is reached does not follow an absolute truth criterion but rather, as is the case with any complex and ill-defined decision, follows a consensus criterion of truth. Research on wisdom has reliably demon- strated that there is high consensus about whether or not a certain judg- ment satisfies the wisdom definition and to what degree (e.g., Baltes & Staudinger, 2000; Staudinger, in press). Further, it is important that the definition of balancing one’s own good with the good of others does not link human strengths too closely to given circumstances, as is often the case with definitions of adaptivity (e.g., when adaptivity is defined as in- creasing subjective well-being or increasing objective rewards, such as in- come or prestige). Rather, it is crucial for a definition of human strengths to include the possibility of transcending and improving given personal and societal circumstances. Thus, searching for the definition of “human strengths” or “the good life” on a meta-level rather than a concrete level and adopting a consensus rather than an absolute criterion of truth seem to be worthwhile suggestions to discuss. The chapters in this book address multiple aspects of these funda- mental definitional questions and their implications for understanding mental and physical health, as well as processes and outcomes in such domains as social development, aging, intelligence, and judgment. It is important to emphasize that these definitional questions are not purely academic. Many societal decisions rest on how human strengths and ca- pabilities are defined, measured, and used-for example, to open the doors of educational and professional opportunity (or to close them; see Stern- berg, chapter 22, this volume), to evaluate the outcomes of different med- ical and psychological treatments (see Ryff & Singer, chapter 19, this vol- ume; Seligtnan & Peterson, chapter 21, this volume), or to develop interventions in such areas as peace education (Eisenberg & Ota Wang, chapter 9, this volume) and corporate cultures of excellence (Frey, Jonas, & Greitemeyer, chapter 11, this volume). HUMAN STRENGTHS: CHARACTERISTICS OR PROCESSES? One of the first associations with the term “human strength” is prob- ably a personality characteristic. Many efforts to understand and identify CENTRAL ISSUES OF AN EMERGING FIELD 11 human strengths have focused on the individual-level traits-intelligence, optimism, self-efficacy, ego resilience-associated with good life outcomes (e.g., Staudinger & Pasupathi, 2000). The trait approach, while often fos- tering important developments in measurement and allowing the study of mean-level changes of traits over the life span or in response to interven- tions such as psychotherapy, may represent only one type of human strength. Dispositional approaches typically do not consider the underlying processes or dynamics, nor do they focus on the interplay between dispo- sitions and particular situations (see Mischel & Shoda, 1999). Several important processes may be involved in any given trait or strength, and understanding such processes is essential to understanding how people will encode and respond to different situations and to devel- oping interventions that promote the development of human strengths (see, e.g., Mischel & Mendoza-Denton, chapter 17, this volume). In the following sections, we will explore some of the potential advantages of complementing a trait approach with a process-oriented approach to hu- man strengths, using dispositional optimism as an example. Optimism, conceptualized in terms of generalized positive expectan- cies (Scheier & Carver, 1985) or in terms of explanatory style (Peterson & Seligman, 1984), has been linked to good outcomes over the life course, but how are such outcomes realized? In some frameworks, the benefits of optimism are seen to reside primarily in its link to persistence in goal pursuit (Carver & Scheier, 1990). Optimists are those who see their pros- pects favorably and thus will continue efforts to meet their goals. Such an approach would likely yield good outcomes much of the time, but it might also carry certain liabilities if the tendency to assess one’s prospects favor- ably predisposed one to ignoring objective information about risks in the environment or to devoting continued effort to goals that cannot realis- tically be met. One approach to understanding how optimists navigate these risks has been to examine the prospective relation of optimism to the processing of negative information and to problem-solving efforts for both solvable and unsolvable problems (see Aspinwall, Richter, 6r Hoffman, 2001, for a review). These examinations have found that optimism is associated with greater, not lesser, attention to self-relevant negative information and that optimists, when presented with unsolvable problems, are quicker, rather than slower, to disengage from them when some alternative task is avail- able. These findings suggest two important properties of optimism that would not be apparent from a trait-level analysis alone: (a) Optimism is not maintained by ignoring negative information-optimists attend closely to relevant risk information-and (b) optimism seems to be flexible- optimists vary their behavior depending on the objective properties of the problems they face. These and other findings give a different view of what constitutes a 12 ASPINWALL AND STAUDINGER human strength. It seems that it is not so much one or the other personality characteristic-for example, an optimistic outlook or internal control be- liefs-that should be called a human strength. Rather, it seems that human strengths may primarily lie in the ability to flexibly apply as many different resources and skills as necessary to solve a problem or work toward a goal (e.g., Staudinger et al., 1995; Staudinger & Pasupathi, 2000). Such strengths may draw on discriminative facilities (see Cantor, chapter 4, this volume; Mischel & Mendoza-Denton, chapter 17, this volume) and self- regulatory skills or algorithms that help people draw on the optimal char- acteristic or regulatory mechanism at the right time to the right degree (e.g., Frederick & Loewenstein, 1999; Staudinger, 2000; see also Baltes 6r Freund, chapter 2, this volume). For instance, returning to the optimism example, there is evidence that people seem to deploy optimism strategically, using favorable beliefs to motivate action toward implementing plans, but suspending such beliefs at the point at which specific plans are made (Taylor & Gollwitzer, 1995; see also Armor & Taylor, 1998). These findings, in turn, give rise to an interest in understanding the cognitive, behavioral, and social processes that support such flexible self-regulatory efforts, among them the ability to change one’s perspective on a problem and to elicit and use information from one’s own or others’ experiences with particular problems in planning one’s own course of action (Ashby, Isen, & Turken, 1999; Aspinwall, 1998, 2001; Aspinwall, Hill, & Leaf, 2002). Identifying such processes provides a way of understanding flexible problem solving and suggests ways of teach- ing specific skills to increase human strengths rather than just yielding a general injunction to be more optimistic. ARE ALL HUMAN STRENGTHS CONSCIOUS AND INTENTIONAL? A related issue that arises from this consideration of characteristics and regulatory processes is the question of whether all human strengths are necessarily conscious and intentional. Even though reflexivity is one of the major discriminating features of the human species, it may not necessarily be the case that human strengths are always conscious and linked to in- tentional action or reaction. Rather, it is possible that human evolution, as well as ontogenesis, has produced “strength patterns” of perception, ac- tion, and reaction on an automatic and unintentional level. For instance, subjective well-being in heterogeneous samples of adults on a scale from 0 to 10 is always located slightly above 6, rather than 5, which would be the theoretical mean of the scale. Well-being researchers have argued that the ability to retain or regain slightly positive feelings of well-being may have had a survival advantage (Diener, 1994). The devel- opment of expertise provides another example of the “unintentional” facets CENTRAL ISSUES OF AN EMERGING FlELD 13 of human strengths. With increasing levels of knowledge and skill in a given domain, actions and reactions become increasingly automatized and intuitive (e.g., Ericsson & Smith, 1991). Thus, limiting the study of human strengths to the conscious and intentional realm would exclude many im- portant phenomena (see also Berridge, 1999). HUMAN STRENGTHS IN DEVELOPMENTAL, SOCIAL, AND MATERIAL CONTEXT In trying to define and study human strengths, it is crucial to ac- knowledge contextual dependencies. It seems useful to emphasize that even if observed or measured in the individual, the microgenesis and ontogenesis of many (if not all) human strengths involve interactions with certain material or person contexts or some combination of these. The identifi- cation of particular developmental, material, and social contexts that pro- mote or debilitate human strengths thus should be an important focus in a psychology of human strengths. In research on lifespan development that addresses contextual dependencies and the plasticity of human develop- ment, this has always been a topic of pivotal interest (see Baltes & Freund, chapter 2, this volume; Carstensen & Charles, chapter 6, this volume; FernBndez-Ballesteros, chapter 10, this volume; Magnusson & Mahoney, chapter 16, this volume). Another research area emphasizing the impor- tance of considering context when studying human strength is human so- cial ecology (see Stokols, chapter 23, this volume). Understanding the situations and experiences-both everyday and extraordinary-that promote the microgenesis and ontogenesis of strengths will be an important goal in the study of human strengths. What is known so far, for instance, is that experiencing and mastering very difficult and threatening situations in the long run often support the development of personal growth. Research on lifespan development (e.g., Elder, 1998), as well as investigations in the area of post-traumatic stress syndrome (e.g., Maercker, Schiitzwohl, & Solomon, 1999) speak to the ontogenetic im- portance of context. However, it is not only over time that people need contexts to develop human strengths; in addition, within a given situation certain contextual features promote and others debilitate the expression of human strengths. Research on wisdom again serves as an example; it has been dem- onstrated that wisdom-related knowledge and judgment concerning diffi- cult life problems were increased by one standard deviation if participants were offered the possibility to discuss the difficult life problem with a person whom they knew well before they gave their individual response (Stau- dinger & Baltes, 1996). Thus, the opportunity to talk with a familiar person about the problem at hand, exchange thoughts, and create new ideas and perspectives supported the strength of good insight into difficult life mat- 14 ASPINWALL AND STAUDINGER ters. Research in organizational psychology on the conditions of corporate culture that foster and sustain effective group decision making and orga- nizational innovation provides additional examples (Frey et al., chapter 11, this volume). Thus, a contextual and social perspective on human strengths may be especially important to researchers interested in creating interven- tions to promote human strengths. There is another important sense in which human strengths may be wedded to the social context: Many human strengths are themselves re- lational or collective. Based on a wide range of evidence linking close relationships to health and happiness, the ability of human beings to form loving bonds with one another is possibly one of their greatest strengths (Berscheid, chapter 3, this volume). Given the importance of forming and maintaining social bonds, we suspect that many human strengths may be found (and developed) in each person’s relationships with other people. Such interpersonal and relational strengths as patience, empathy, compas- sion, cooperation, tolerance, appreciation of diversity, understanding, and forgiveness, though they remain understudied in comparison to “individ- ual” strengths, seem ripe for continued investigation from evolutionary, developmental, and social perspectives (see, e.g., Eisenberg & Ota Wang, chapter 9, this volume). Still other kinds of strength may be found at the collective or group level (see, e.g., Caprara & Cervone, chapter 5, this volume; Frey et al., chapter 11, this volume). THE POSITIVE AND THE NEGATIVE: INTERDEPENDENT OR INDEPENDENT PROCESSES? Another central task for a psychology of human strengths is to un- derstand whether and how positive and negative experiences depend on each other and work together. Thus, a call for the scientific study of such positive states as joy, play, hope, and love-of what is positive, successful, and adaptive in human experience-should not be misunderstood as a call to ignore negative aspects of human experience. That is, a psychology of human strengths should not be the study of how negative experience may be avoided or ignored, but rather how positive and negative experience may be interrelated (see, e.g., Baltes & Freund, chapter 2, this volume; Carsten- sen & Charles, chapter 6, this volume; Larsen, Hemenover, Norris, & Ca- cioppo, chapter 15, this volume; Ryff & Singer, chapter 19, this volume). Indeed, some philosophical perspectives suggest that the positive and negative are by definition dependent on each other; that is, human exis- tence seems to be constituted by basic dialectics, such as gains and losses, happiness and sorrow, autonomy and dependency, or positive and negative (e.g., Riegel, 1976). It is part of the very nature of such pairs that one component cannot exist without the other. Thus, from this perspective, CENTRAL ISSUES OF AN EMERGING FIELD 15