Resilience and thriving: issues, models, and linkages - Thriving: Broadening the Paradigm Beyond Illness to Health

Journal of Social Issues, Summer, 1998 by Charles S. Carver

I have a different view of the underlying metatheoretical mechanism, however. I don't believe either group is engaged in a discrepancy-amplifying loop. Rather, I believe confident people are in a discrepancy-reducing loop, one with optimal functioning as its desired end point, in which people are struggling to pull themselves upward to a better position (cf. the upward drive postulated in social comparison theory by Festinger, 1954, and the upward drive posited by Adler, 1927). I see doubtful people as displaying a giving-up response - a turning away from efforts - that deepens over recurrences.

A Catastrophe Model of This Bifurcation

Regardless of the underlying dynamic, it seems likely that the onward effort and the giving-up tendency both are exaggerated by increases in the importance of the situation the person encounters (Carver & Scheier, 1998). It may be argued as well that when important events recur, whichever response is evoked initially becomes even more ingrained. The cases now under consideration - traumatic or major adverse events - seem to fit into the category of high-importance events. Thus, this line of thought may be applicable to individual differences in responses to trauma.

The response exaggeration I think follows from importance has two aspects that can be depicted in the form of a cusp catastrophe [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED]. A full description of the characteristics of the catastrophe is beyond the scope of this article (for more detail see Carver & Scheier, 1998), but several points about it can be made fairly easily, while indicating its applicability to the case at hand. In this application, there are two predictor variables (confidence and importance) and an outcome variable (engagement - effort versus giving up). In this depiction, when importance increases, the tendency of high confidence to produce high effort increases (area A on [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED]). Similarly, as importance increases, the tendency of low confidence to produce giving up increases (area B on [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED]). The divergence of these two tendencies is one kind of exaggeration that follows from increases in importance.

Hysteresis and a Second Kind of Exaggeration

The second kind of exaggeration rests on another feature of the catstrophe surface, which is a little more complicated to explain. Increasing the degree of importance induces a bifurcation of responses into categories of continued effort versus giving up. Further, as one moves from the back edge of the surface toward the front, a zone of what's called hysteresis develops [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 5 OMITTED]. This is a region of folding and overlapping in the surface, such that two values of y exist for a given value of x. (No points exist on the dashed portion of Figure 5, only on the top and bottom.)

Discussions of the cusp catastrophe often focus on consequences of movement on the surface from one area to another. Where you start has important consequences. Return to Figure 4 and consider points 1 and 2 on the back edge of the surface, where importance is low. These points are very close together on the confidence dimension. Thus, at low importance, they predict similar levels of effort. Now consider what happens if importance increases and these points are projected directly forward on the surface. They follow paths that quickly diverge, ending up at the two separate areas of the surface. Now the slight differences in confidence predict very different levels of effort.