Resilience to Stress and Adversity: A Narrative Review of the Role of Positive Affect.

The modern conception of mental health encompasses not only mental illness but also mental wellbeing, including positive emotional states and other forms of positive experience. Accordingly, research on resilience - that is, recovery or adaptation following adversity - has recently expanded to consider the roles of positive affect in the resilience process. To review this research, we performed a keyword search of all peer-reviewed journals within the American Psychological Association's PsycInfo database, retrieving all studies of positive affect in the context of resilience. These studies measured positive affect either as the outcome of the resilience process or as a resilience resource in its own right. With positive affect as the outcome, the literature suggests that various resilience resources can promote positive affect following a stressor, especially positive personality traits (eg, hope, optimism, self-compassion) and supportive interpersonal connections. With positive affect as a resilience resource, the literature suggests that higher levels of positive affect may protect individuals from the impact of stress on a number of outcomes, such as depression and trauma symptoms. In all, the reviewed research showcases a wide range of stressors, resources, and outcomes, and there are numerous openings for future discoveries in this promising area of inquiry.

A Web-Based Well-being Program for Health Care Workers (Thrive): Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Trial.

BACKGROUND: Mental health has come to be understood as not merely the absence of mental illness but also the presence of mental well-being, and recent interventions have sought to increase well-being in various populations. A population that deserves particular attention is that of health care workers, whose occupations entail high levels of stress, especially given the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. A neuroscience-based web-based well-being program for health care workers-the Thrive program-has been newly developed to promote habits and activities that contribute to brain health and overall mental well-being. OBJECTIVE: This paper describes the protocol for a randomized controlled trial whose objective is to evaluate the Thrive program in comparison with an active control condition to measure whether the program is effective at increasing well-being and decreasing symptoms of psychological distress in health care workers at a designated Australian hospital. METHODS: The trial will comprise two groups (intervention vs active control) and 4 measurement occasions over a 12-week period. A survey will be administered in each of weeks 0, 4, 8, and 12, and the well-being program will be delivered in weeks 1-7 (via web-based video presentations or digital pamphlets). Each of the 4 surveys will comprise a range of questionnaires to measure well-being, psychological distress, and other key variables. The planned analyses will estimate group-by-time interaction effects to test the hypothesis that mental health will increase over time in the intervention condition relative to the active control condition. RESULTS: The Thrive program was delivered to a small number of wards at the hospital between February 2021 and July 2021, and it will be delivered to the remaining wards from October 2021 to December 2021. A power calculation has recommended a sample size of at least 200 participants in total. A linear mixed model will be used to estimate the interaction effects. CONCLUSIONS: This trial seeks to evaluate a new web-based well-being program for health care workers at a major public hospital. It will contribute to the growing body of research on mental well-being and ways to promote it. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry ACTRN12621000027819; https://tinyurl.com/58wwjut9. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID): DERR1-10.2196/34005.