From helplessness to controllability: toward a neuroscience of resilience.

"Learned helplessness" refers to debilitating outcomes, such as passivity and increased fear, that follow an uncontrollable adverse event, but do not when that event is controllable. The original explanation argued that when events are uncontrollable the animal learns that outcomes are independent of its behavior, and that this is the active ingredient in producing the effects. Controllable adverse events, in contrast, fail to produce these outcomes because they lack the active uncontrollability element. Recent work on the neural basis of helplessness, however, takes the opposite view. Prolonged exposure to aversive stimulation per se produces the debilitation by potent activation of serotonergic neurons in the brainstem dorsal raphe nucleus. Debilitation is prevented with an instrumental controlling response, which activates prefrontal circuitry detecting control and subsequently blunting the dorsal raphe nucleus response. Furthermore, learning control alters the prefrontal response to future adverse events, thereby preventing debilitation and producing long-term resiliency. The general implications of these neuroscience findings may apply to psychological therapy and prevention, in particular by suggesting the importance of cognitions and control, rather than habits of control.

Regional personality assessment through social media language.

OBJECTIVE: We explore the personality of counties as assessed through linguistic patterns on social media. Such studies were previously limited by the cost and feasibility of large-scale surveys; however, language-based computational models applied to large social media datasets now allow for large-scale personality assessment. METHOD: We applied a language-based assessment of the five factor model of personality to 6,064,267 U.S. Twitter users. We aggregated the Twitter-based personality scores to 2,041 counties and compared to political, economic, social, and health outcomes measured through surveys and by government agencies. RESULTS: There was significant personality variation across counties. Openness to experience was higher on the coasts, conscientiousness was uniformly spread, extraversion was higher in southern states, agreeableness was higher in western states, and emotional stability was highest in the south. Across 13 outcomes, language-based personality estimates replicated patterns that have been observed in individual-level and geographic studies. This includes higher Republican vote share in less agreeable counties and increased life satisfaction in more conscientious counties. CONCLUSIONS: Results suggest that regions vary in their personality and that these differences can be studied through computational linguistic analysis of social media. Furthermore, these methods may be used to explore other psychological constructs across geographies.

Closed- and open-vocabulary approaches to text analysis: A review, quantitative comparison, and recommendations.

Technology now makes it possible to understand efficiently and at large scale how people use language to reveal their everyday thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. Written text has been analyzed through both theory-based, closed-vocabulary methods from the social sciences as well as data-driven, open-vocabulary methods from computer science, but these approaches have not been comprehensively compared. To provide guidance on best practices for automatically analyzing written text, this narrative review and quantitative synthesis compares five predominant closed- and open-vocabulary methods: Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), the General Inquirer, DICTION, Latent Dirichlet Allocation, and Differential Language Analysis. We compare the linguistic features associated with gender, age, and personality across the five methods using an existing dataset of Facebook status updates and self-reported survey data from 65,896 users. Results are fairly consistent across methods. The closed-vocabulary approaches efficiently summarize concepts and are helpful for understanding how people think, with LIWC2015 yielding the strongest, most parsimonious results. Open-vocabulary approaches reveal more specific and concrete patterns across a broad range of content domains, better address ambiguous word senses, and are less prone to misinterpretation, suggesting that they are well-suited for capturing the nuances of everyday psychological processes. We detail several errors that can occur in closed-vocabulary analyses, the impact of sample size, number of words per user and number of topics included in open-vocabulary analyses, and implications of different analytical decisions. We conclude with recommendations for researchers, advocating for a complementary approach that combines closed- and open-vocabulary methods. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Robert A. Rescorla (1940-2020).

Memorializes Robert Arthur Rescorla (1940-2020), emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Rescorla was the world's most distinguished scholar in animal learning and a great teacher. Rescorla thought of himself as primarily an experimen talist, and his experiments on Pavlovian conditioning and instrumental learning would win any prize for the aesthetics of experimental design. Most of his nearly 200 empirical articles included multiple experiments with replications. Among Re scorla's most beautiful experiments were the studies of extinc tion performed in the last decade of his career. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Development of character strengths across the deployment cycle among U.S. Army soldiers.

OBJECTIVE: Despite a narrative of post-traumatic growth and resilience, research reliably demonstrating positive character development following adversity has proved elusive. In the current study, we examined changes in character strengths in Army soldiers deploying for the first time. METHOD: The sample was comprised of 212,386 Army soldiers (Mage  = 26.5 years old, SD = 7.13; 70.8% White) who were deploying for the first time. Character strengths were assessed once before and up to three times following soldiers' return from deployment. RESULTS: We found evidence for two classes of change-a resilient class ("stable high") and a declining class ("persistent low"). Most soldiers were resilient-they had high levels of character strengths prior to deployment and changed very little across the deployment cycle. Approximately 40% of soldiers started with lower character and experienced initial declines post-deployment, from which they experienced no more than small gains over time. CONCLUSIONS: Character strengths were highly stable across the deployment transition but some soldiers experienced initial declines from which they never fully rebounded. The findings are discussed in the context of the mechanisms that drive character development.

Optimism and risk of incident hypertension: a target for primordial prevention.

AIMS: Optimism is associated with reduced cardiovascular disease risk; however, few prospective studies have considered optimism in relation to hypertension risk specifically. We investigated whether optimism was associated with a lower risk of developing hypertension in U.S. service members, who are more likely to develop high blood pressure early in life. We also evaluated race/ethnicity, sex and age as potential effect modifiers of these associations. METHODS: Participants were 103 486 hypertension-free U.S. Army active-duty soldiers (mean age 28.96 years, 61.76% White, 20.04% Black, 11.01% Hispanic, 4.09% Asian, and 3.10% others). We assessed optimism, sociodemographic characteristics, health conditions, health behaviours and depression status at baseline (2009-2010) via self-report and administrative records, and ascertained incident hypertension over follow-up (2010-2014) from electronic health records and health assessments. We used Cox proportional hazards regression models to estimate hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs), and adjusted models for a broad range of relevant covariates. RESULTS: Over a mean follow-up of 3.51 years, 15 052 incident hypertension cases occurred. The highest v. lowest optimism levels were associated with a 22% reduced risk of developing hypertension, after adjusting for all covariates including baseline blood pressure (HR = 0.78; 95% CI = 0.74-0.83). The difference in hypertension risk between the highest v. lowest optimism was also maintained when we excluded soldiers with hypertension in the first two years of follow-up and, separately, when we excluded soldiers with prehypertension at baseline. A dose-response relationship was evident with higher optimism associated with a lower relative risk (p < 0.001). Higher optimism was consistently associated with a lower risk of developing hypertension across sex, age and most race/ethnicity categories. CONCLUSIONS: In a diverse cohort of initially healthy male and female service members particularly vulnerable to developing hypertension, higher optimism levels were associated with reduced hypertension risk independently of sociodemographic and health factors, a particularly notable finding given the young and healthy population. Results suggest optimism is a health asset and a potential target for public health interventions.

Comparison of Cardiovascular Health Between US Army and Civilians.

Background Cardiovascular conditions are common in US Army and civilian populations. The recently developed concept of ideal cardiovascular health provides a new approach to evaluating population cardiovascular status. Methods and Results We defined a cohort of 263 430 active duty Army personnel, aged 17 to 64 years, who completed a 2012 physical examination and a corresponding subset of the noninstitutionalized, civilian US population, who participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey ( NHANES ) 2011 to 2012 cycle. We compared 4 cardiovascular health metrics (current smoking, body mass index, blood pressure, and diabetic status) between Army and civilian groups overall, and separately by sex, race/ethnicity, and age. The Army population was younger, was less often women or Hispanic, and had less post-high school education than the NHANES population. Smoking rates were ≈20% in the Army and NHANES groups, but <15% among Army women and Hispanics. Overall, one third of the Army and NHANES groups and NHANES women, but nearly half of Army women, demonstrated ideal body mass index. Ideal blood pressure was strikingly less prevalent in the Army than NHANES participants (30% versus 55%). Diabetes mellitus was rare in both groups. Conclusions Ideal cardiovascular health was less prevalent in the Army than NHANES group, despite exclusion of the least healthy recruits. Prevalence of ideal body mass index and blood pressure was low in both the Army and NHANES groups, even at early adult ages. This finding reveals the need for policy changes to promote, preserve, and improve ideal cardiovascular health in both the Army and the US population as a whole.

Association Between Predeployment Optimism and Onset of Postdeployment Pain in US Army Soldiers.

Importance: Pain after deployment is a major health care concern. While risk factors have been previously studied, few studies have explored protective factors. Objective: To examine the prospective association between predeployment optimism and the onset of new pain after deployment in US Army soldiers. Design, Setting, and Participants: This prospective longitudinal cohort study examined US Army soldiers (active duty, Reserve, and National Guard) who deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq between February 12, 2010, and August 29, 2014, and completed the necessary psychological and health assessments before and after deployment. Analyses were performed in the Person-Event Data Environment between July 2016 and November 2018. This study relied exclusively on existing, secondary Army data. Of the 413 763 Army soldiers who met the specified deployment criteria, 385 925 soldiers were missing 1 or more of the required assessment forms. Of the remaining 27 838 soldiers who were examined for eligibility, 7104 soldiers were excluded because of preexisting back pain, joint pain, or frequent headaches. These exclusions resulted in a final analytic sample of 20 734 eligible soldiers. Main Outcomes and Measures: This study examined new reports of pain after deployment, including new back pain, joint pain, and frequent headaches. Results: Among 20 734 US Army soldiers (87.8% male; mean [SD] age, 29.06 [8.42] years), 37.3% reported pain in at least 1 new area of the body after deployment: 25.3% reported new back pain, 23.1% reported new joint pain, and 12.1% reported new frequent headaches. As a continuous measure, each 1-U increase in optimism was associated with 11% lower odds of reporting any new pain after deployment, even while adjusting for demographic, military, and combat factors (odds ratio, 0.89; 95% CI, 0.86-0.93). Tertile analyses revealed that compared with soldiers with high optimism (lowest odds of new pain) soldiers with low optimism had 35% greater odds of reporting new pain in any of the 3 sites evaluated (odds ratio, 1.35; 95% CI, 1.21-1.50). In addition, a larger increase in risk of new pain was observed when comparing the moderate-optimism and low-optimism groups rather than the high-optimism and moderate-optimism groups. Conclusions and Relevance: Higher levels of optimism were associated with lower odds of reporting new pain after deployment, over and above other common determinants of pain, including demographic and military characteristics and combat experiences. Soldiers with low levels of optimism before deployment could benefit from programs geared toward enhancing optimism.

Primal world beliefs.

Beck's insight-that beliefs about one's self, future, and environment shape behavior-transformed depression treatment. Yet environment beliefs remain relatively understudied. We introduce a set of environment beliefs-primal world beliefs or primals-that concern the world's overall character (e.g., the world is interesting, the world is dangerous). To create a measure, we systematically identified candidate primals (e.g., analyzing tweets, historical texts, etc.); conducted exploratory factor analysis (N = 930) and two confirmatory factor analyses (N = 524; N = 529); examined sequence effects (N = 219) and concurrent validity (N = 122); and conducted test-retests over 2 weeks (n = 122), 9 months (n = 134), and 19 months (n = 398). The resulting 99-item Primals Inventory (PI-99) measures 26 primals with three overarching beliefs-Safe, Enticing, and Alive (mean α = .93)-that typically explain ∼55% of the common variance. These beliefs were normally distributed; stable (2 weeks, 9 months, and 19 month test-retest results averaged .88, .75, and .77, respectively); strongly correlated with many personality and wellbeing variables (e.g., Safe and optimism, r = .61; Enticing and depression, r = -.52; Alive and meaning, r = .54); and explained more variance in life satisfaction, transcendent experience, trust, and gratitude than the BIG 5 (3%, 3%, 6%, and 12% more variance, respectively). In sum, the PI-99 showed strong psychometric characteristics, primals plausibly shape many personality and wellbeing variables, and a broad research effort examining these relationships is warranted. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Positive Psychology: A Personal History.

As president of the American Psychological Association in 1998, I organized researchers and practitioners to work on building well-being, not just on the traditional task of reducing ill-being. Substantial research then found that well-being causes many external benefits, including better physical and mental health. Among the applications of Positive Psychology are national psychological accounts of well-being, Positive Psychotherapy, the classification of strengths and virtues, Comprehensive Soldier Fitness, and Positive Education. Positive Psychology has spread beyond psychology into neuroscience, health, psychiatry, theology, and even to the humanities. Positive Psychology has many critics, and I comment on the strongest criticisms. I conclude with the hope that the building of well-being will become a cornerstone of morality, politics, and religion.

Reprint of: Positive Psychological Well-Being and Cardiovascular Disease: JACC Health Promotion Series.

Facets of positive psychological well-being, such as optimism, have been identified as positive health assets because they are prospectively associated with the 7 metrics of cardiovascular health (CVH) and improved outcomes related to cardiovascular disease. Connections between psychological well-being and cardiovascular conditions may be mediated through biological, behavioral, and psychosocial pathways. Individual-level interventions, such as mindfulness-based programs and positive psychological interventions, have shown promise for modifying psychological well-being. Further, workplaces are using well-being-focused interventions to promote employee CVH, and these interventions represent a potential model for expanding psychological well-being programs to communities and societies. Given the relevance of psychological well-being to promoting CVH, this review outlines clinical recommendations to assess and promote well-being in encounters with patients. Finally, a research agenda is proposed. Additional prospective observational studies are needed to understand mechanisms underlying the connection between psychological well-being and cardiovascular outcomes. Moreover, rigorous intervention trials are needed to assess whether psychological well-being-promoting programs can improve cardiovascular outcomes.

Positive Psychological Well-Being and Cardiovascular Disease: JACC Health Promotion Series.

Facets of positive psychological well-being, such as optimism, have been identified as positive health assets because they are prospectively associated with the 7 metrics of cardiovascular health (CVH) and improved outcomes related to cardiovascular disease. Connections between psychological well-being and cardiovascular conditions may be mediated through biological, behavioral, and psychosocial pathways. Individual-level interventions, such as mindfulness-based programs and positive psychological interventions, have shown promise for modifying psychological well-being. Further, workplaces are using well-being-focused interventions to promote employee CVH, and these interventions represent a potential model for expanding psychological well-being programs to communities and societies. Given the relevance of psychological well-being to promoting CVH, this review outlines clinical recommendations to assess and promote well-being in encounters with patients. Finally, a research agenda is proposed. Additional prospective observational studies are needed to understand mechanisms underlying the connection between psychological well-being and cardiovascular outcomes. Moreover, rigorous intervention trials are needed to assess whether psychological well-being-promoting programs can improve cardiovascular outcomes.

Protective Effects of Psychological Strengths Against Psychiatric Disorders Among Soldiers.

This study prospectively examined psychological strengths targeted in U.S. Army training programs as predictors of psychiatric diagnosis in active duty soldiers. At baseline, the cohort (140,584 soldiers) was without psychiatric disorder. Soldiers were then followed for 2 yr and classified as healthy, or acquiring a psychiatric diagnosis (adjustment disorder, anxiety disorder, depression, or post-traumatic stress disorder), or being prescribed psychotropic medication without a psychiatric diagnosis. Soldiers who remained healthy reported significantly higher strengths scores at baseline, compared with soldiers who were diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder. In addition, soldiers in the worst strengths decile were twice as likely to develop a psychiatric disorder, compared with soldiers in the top 50% on baseline strengths. Strengths afforded the greatest protection against depression. Offering tailored resilience training programs could help the Army steel vulnerable soldiers against the challenges of life, military training, and combat.

Happiest People Revisited.

In a past Psychological Science article, Diener and Seligman (2002) explored the characteristics of extremely happy individuals and found that strong social relationships characterized the entire group. The study was popular, perhaps because the authors focused on the very happiest people, not merely on correlations across the entire spectrum of subjective well-being. In the current study, we replicated and extended the earlier paper here by examining, in a world sample, the differences between the happiest individuals and unhappy and averagely happy people. We largely replicated earlier findings; basic need fulfillment and social resources were two ingredients for high subjective well-being. Replicating and extending the earlier findings, we found that, compared with the averagely happy people, the happiest people were more likely to come from societies high in subjective well-being and social capital. To achieve very high happiness, it is helpful not only to have desirable personal circumstances, but also to live in a prosperous happy society with strong social support. As in the original study, although a few characteristics seemed virtually necessary for subjective well-being (SWB), no characteristic guaranteed it. We also uncovered variables separating the groups that might be outcomes of SWB, for example, helping others, exercising, and not smoking.

Beyond Money: Progress on an Economy of Well-Being.

In our 2004 "Beyond Money" article, we argued that national accounts of psychological and subjective well-being should complement the economic indicators that frequently guide policy decisions. We claimed that economic indicators fail to reflect important aspects of quality of life that well-being indicators capture. Since the time of our article, progress has been made, and scores of nations have used some forms of well-being measures. The National Academy of Sciences of the United States and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development both issued reports on accounts of well-being. Researchers have pointed to policies that are supported by the findings, such as environmental and economic policies. The emergence of "big data" has opened major new pathways for measuring well-being in inexpensive, unobtrusive, and nonreactive fashion. Psychological researchers now need to create superordinate combinations of subjective and objective measures of well-being to study the impact of the policies they advocate. The accounts can serve as a lever for convincing policymakers to enact policies that increase human flourishing.

The Science and Practice of Self-Control.

In 2005, we discovered that self-control "outdoes" talent in predicting academic success during adolescence. Since then, a surfeit of longitudinal evidence has affirmed the importance of self-control to achieving everyday goals that conflict with momentary temptations. In parallel, research that has "lumped" self-control with other facets of Big Five conscientiousness has shown the superior predictive power of this broad family of individual differences for diverse life outcomes. Self-control can also be "split" from related traits that in certain contexts demonstrate superior predictive power for achievement. Most important, both the "lumping" and "splitting" traditions have enhanced our understanding of the underlying mechanisms and antecedents of self-control. Collectively, progress over the past decade and a half suggests a bright future for the science and practice of self-control.

The factor structure of the Values in Action Inventory of Strengths (VIA-IS): An item-level exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) bifactor analysis.

The factor structure of the Values in Action Inventory of Strengths (VIA-IS; Peterson & Seligman, 2004) has not been well established as a result of methodological challenges primarily attributable to a global positivity factor, item cross-loading across character strengths, and questions concerning the unidimensionality of the scales assessing character strengths. We sought to overcome these methodological challenges by applying exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) at the item level using a bifactor analytic approach to a large sample of 447,573 participants who completed the VIA-IS with all 240 character strengths items and a reduced set of 107 unidimensional character strength items. It was found that a 6-factor bifactor structure generally held for the reduced set of unidimensional character strength items; these dimensions were justice, temperance, courage, wisdom, transcendence, humanity, and an overarching general factor that is best described as dispositional positivity. (PsycINFO Database Record

Living in the Past, Present, and Future: Measuring Temporal Orientation With Language.

Temporal orientation refers to individual differences in the relative emphasis one places on the past, present, or future, and it is related to academic, financial, and health outcomes. We propose and evaluate a method for automatically measuring temporal orientation through language expressed on social media. Judges rated the temporal orientation of 4,302 social media messages. We trained a classifier based on these ratings, which could accurately predict the temporal orientation of new messages in a separate validation set (accuracy/mean sensitivity = .72; mean specificity = .77). We used the classifier to automatically classify 1.3 million messages written by 5,372 participants (50% female; ages 13-48). Finally, we tested whether individual differences in past, present, and future orientation differentially related to gender, age, Big Five personality, satisfaction with life, and depressive symptoms. Temporal orientations exhibit several expected correlations with age, gender, and Big Five personality. More future-oriented people were older, more likely to be female, more conscientious, less impulsive, less depressed, and more satisfied with life; present orientation showed the opposite pattern. Language-based assessments can complement and extend existing measures of temporal orientation, providing an alternative approach and additional insights into language and personality relationships.

Phobias and Preparedness - Republished Article.

Some inadequacies of the classical conditioning analysis of phobias are discussed: phobias are highly resistant to extinction, whereas laboratory fear conditioning, unlike avoidance conditioning, extinguishes rapidly; phobias comprise a nonarbitrary and limited set of objects, whereas fear conditioning is thought to occur to an unlimited range of conditioned stimuli. Furthermore, phobias, unlike laboratory fear conditioning, are often acquired in one trial and seem quite resistant to change by "cognitive" means. An analysis of phobias using a more contemporary model of fear conditioning is proposed. In this view, phobias are seen as instances of highly "prepared" learning (Seligman, 1970). Such prepared learning is selective, highly resistant to extinction, probably noncognitive and can be acquired in one trial. A reconstruction of the notion of symbolism is suggested.

Positive Cardiovascular Health: A Timely Convergence.

Two concepts, positive health and cardiovascular health, have emerged recently from the respective fields of positive psychology and preventive cardiology. These parallel constructs are converging to foster positive cardiovascular health and a growing collaboration between psychologists and cardiovascular scientists to achieve significant improvements in both individual and population cardiovascular health. We explore these 2 concepts and note close similarities in the measures that define them, the health states that they aim to produce, and their intended long-term clinical and public health outcomes. We especially examine subjective health assets, such as optimism, that are a core focus of positive psychology, but have largely been neglected in preventive cardiology. We identify research to date on positive cardiovascular health, discuss its strengths and limitations thus far, and outline directions for further engagement of cardiovascular scientists with colleagues in positive psychology to advance this new field.