Resilience

I happened to be at my sister’s home, in Minneapolis, on the morning of 9/11.

I’d flown in the night before to attend my cousin’s funeral and intended to fly back to Michigan that evening. But of course I didn’t; all flights were grounded. I felt lucky, though, to get the last ticket for the September 12 train to Ann Arbor, a 17-hour trip.

That train was full of displaced airline passengers. And that day, that group of strangers was talking. They shared their 9/11 stories and their concerns about friends and family who lived or worked near the towers. Everyone seemed to have a tie to New York, and hearts were a fusion of empathy and vulnerability.

The man sitting next to me and I spoke like long-lost friends: “What will America be like from now on?” “What will it feel like to fly next time?” Deep into our hours-long friendship, he asked me if people would ever be the same. I thought for a moment. I heard the buzz of conversation and connection all around us. Every so often, a peal of laughter would erupt somewhere in our car. “Do you hear that?” I asked my companion. “I think they are already the same.” Hurt, yes, but still the same.

Trying times inevitably bring negative emotions. Unchecked, negativity can pull people down toward depression and worse. Yet research in the science of emotions also shows that even in the midst of downward spirals, people can choose a different course. The key is to tap into more positive emotions. That’s what the past decade of new scholarship—and of the experience of so many Americans caught in different ways in the aftermath of 9/11—has taught us.

I arrived back at the University of Michigan to resume my sabbatical writing project on positive emotions. But now I wondered: “Who will care?” Maybe the science of positive emotions was no longer relevant in this new era of terrorism. For the first time, I questioned my life’s work.

About a day into my funk, I realized that, like most Americans, my distress was pulling me down into an abyss. Then I remembered those people laughing on the train a few days earlier. I began to ask myself how I could best test the idea that even now, in the midst of national tragedy, positive emotions were still valuable.

Serendipitously, my students and I had just completed a large study in which, using a simple survey, we measured the resilience of more than 100 college students. Perhaps we could find those folks again to investigate resilience in action in the wake of 9/11. Within days we had the institutional review board’s approval to invite the students to complete additional surveys. They lived in Ann Arbor, safely removed from Ground Zero. Even so, like most Americans, they had experienced considerable stress after 9/11. They were worried about friends and family who lived or worked in New York City or Washington. They were afraid of more terrorist attacks, of the possibility of war. They were afraid to fly.

We learned a lot about how resilience works. The students who had scored high on the original survey for having a resilient personality were clearly coping better than their peers were. They showed the fewest signs of depression and even seemed to have grown stronger; they were more optimistic, more tranquil, and more fulfilled in their lives.

The pivotal difference between those with and without resilient personalities was the positivity of their emotions. That was the active ingredient that buffered them from depression and spurred their postcrisis growth. Without positive emotions, there was no rebound. Our data also showed that people who bounced back were not in denial and were not selfish. Like everyone else, they were compassionate and were pained by difficult emotions. Yet like my fellow passengers on that Amtrak train, mixed in with their suffering and concern, they also experienced positive emotions.

The events of 9/11 shocked the world. But resilient people have bounced back and grown stronger, and Americans even seem more resilient as a whole. Indeed, our basic findings on how positive emotions undergird resilience have been replicated by other researchers. In the past decade, we’ve seen not only a groundswell of scientific interest in resilience, but also a fundamental shift in how it is viewed.

Before 9/11, experts saw resilience in the face of tragedy as a rare human feat. Now we know that, in the context of a well-functioning system of emotions, resilience can be normative, or standard. Indeed, recent work has shown that resilience can and does increase over time, in step with people’s day-to-day experiences of ordinary positive emotions and in ways that help them find their lives to be more satisfying. And when people learn how to exercise positive emotions, they become even better able to adapt to life’s inevitable upsets and adversity.

Most significant, within the past year or so, the great promise of this new science of resilience—and of positive psychology more generally—has translated into efforts to increase resilience in people who perhaps now need it most: those in the military who have faced an unprecedented number of repeated deployments in the two extended wars attributable to the events of 9/11. Increasingly, military personnel have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan with mental-health problems, including depression, post-traumatic-stress disorder, and suicidal tendencies, which also threaten the health and well-being of their family members.

To address those problems and to raise the emotional fitness of all soldiers, the Army has collaborated with behavioral scientists to start a multifaceted Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program. That effort, while noble, faces considerable challenges. Yet to the extent that behavioral scientists are willing to translate and test theories of resilience within the crucible of military service and international conflict, both the military population and the science itself may see mutual benefit.

Human resilience matters more than ever in the wake of 9/11. Fortunately, among the many lessons of the past decade is that genuine positive emotions are available to all. And these forms of positivity matter, especially when people are pressed to their limits. They are the renewable human resources that fuel resilience.

Barbara L. Fredrickson is a professor of psychology and principal investigator of the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of Positivity: Groundbreaking Research Reveals How to Embrace the Hidden Strength of Positive Emotions, Overcome Negativity, and Thrive (Crown Books, 2009).