Jul 7, 2022 08:03 PM
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022...d-emotions
EXCERPTS: “What does not kill me, makes me stronger,” 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously wrote. Variations of that aphorism abound in literary, spiritual and, more recently, psychological texts.
That psychological research suggests that at least half of survivors not only recover from traumatic experiences but also go on to develop more appreciation for life, stronger relationships and emotional strength — a phenomenon researchers call “posttraumatic growth.”
[...] But in a series of talks presented in May in Chicago at the Association for Psychological Science conference, some researchers called findings of posttraumatic growth “largely illusory.” Growth studies suffer from serious methodological flaws, these researchers say. That includes a reliance on surveys that require people to assess their personal growth over time, a task that most people struggle with.
Better research tools may not remedy the problem. That’s because these studies are fundamentally flawed, the researchers say. They argue that the impetus to study trauma in terms of growth stems from a Western mind-set that tends to value positive emotions and devalue or even avoid negative emotions. That can pressure survivors to deny or suppress their negative feelings, which could have harmful consequences.
[...] The researchers found no correlation between high perceived growth scores on the standard inventory and actual growth scores on the modified inventory and five surveys related to well-being.
That mismatch occurs because people are terrible at remembering how they felt in the past, says study coauthor Crystal Park, a clinical health psychologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. “I want to throw out the concept of people being able to accurately report that they have grown.”
Tedeschi counters that trauma cleaves one’s life into a before and after, making it more feasible for many people to distinguish changes over time. What’s more, growth takes time, he says. “You can’t expect people to change their spiritual beliefs in eight weeks.”
But how much time? And if enough time passes, how does one know that the growth arises from the trauma and not some other major life experience, like moving across the country or having children? Research shows that people are not great at introspection, Jayawickreme says. “We tend to come up with all types of stories for change, but those stories are just stories. They don’t really reflect what actually caused that change.”
[...] Beyond the methodological particulars, some researchers studying trauma across cultures question some Western psychologists’ focus on personal growth and, to a lesser degree, resilience — a phenomenon marked by stability during hard times, rather than a steep increase in well-being after an initial decline as observed in posttraumatic growth.
“In Euro-American societies, ‘resilience’ and ‘posttraumatic growth’ are commonly used metaphorical terms for positive responses to extreme adversity,” write University of Zurich psychologists Iara Meili and Andreas Maercker in 2019 in Transcultural Psychiatry. They attribute the popularity of these Western “metaphors” to individualistic societies’ emphasis on self-determination and agency, even in the face of illness or death. These concepts exist elsewhere, Maercker says. But they rarely take on such outsize significance — what he calls “almost a religious approach.”
A societal expectation of growth can put tremendous pressure on survivors to hide their suffering, Jayawickreme says... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: “What does not kill me, makes me stronger,” 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously wrote. Variations of that aphorism abound in literary, spiritual and, more recently, psychological texts.
That psychological research suggests that at least half of survivors not only recover from traumatic experiences but also go on to develop more appreciation for life, stronger relationships and emotional strength — a phenomenon researchers call “posttraumatic growth.”
[...] But in a series of talks presented in May in Chicago at the Association for Psychological Science conference, some researchers called findings of posttraumatic growth “largely illusory.” Growth studies suffer from serious methodological flaws, these researchers say. That includes a reliance on surveys that require people to assess their personal growth over time, a task that most people struggle with.
Better research tools may not remedy the problem. That’s because these studies are fundamentally flawed, the researchers say. They argue that the impetus to study trauma in terms of growth stems from a Western mind-set that tends to value positive emotions and devalue or even avoid negative emotions. That can pressure survivors to deny or suppress their negative feelings, which could have harmful consequences.
[...] The researchers found no correlation between high perceived growth scores on the standard inventory and actual growth scores on the modified inventory and five surveys related to well-being.
That mismatch occurs because people are terrible at remembering how they felt in the past, says study coauthor Crystal Park, a clinical health psychologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. “I want to throw out the concept of people being able to accurately report that they have grown.”
Tedeschi counters that trauma cleaves one’s life into a before and after, making it more feasible for many people to distinguish changes over time. What’s more, growth takes time, he says. “You can’t expect people to change their spiritual beliefs in eight weeks.”
But how much time? And if enough time passes, how does one know that the growth arises from the trauma and not some other major life experience, like moving across the country or having children? Research shows that people are not great at introspection, Jayawickreme says. “We tend to come up with all types of stories for change, but those stories are just stories. They don’t really reflect what actually caused that change.”
[...] Beyond the methodological particulars, some researchers studying trauma across cultures question some Western psychologists’ focus on personal growth and, to a lesser degree, resilience — a phenomenon marked by stability during hard times, rather than a steep increase in well-being after an initial decline as observed in posttraumatic growth.
“In Euro-American societies, ‘resilience’ and ‘posttraumatic growth’ are commonly used metaphorical terms for positive responses to extreme adversity,” write University of Zurich psychologists Iara Meili and Andreas Maercker in 2019 in Transcultural Psychiatry. They attribute the popularity of these Western “metaphors” to individualistic societies’ emphasis on self-determination and agency, even in the face of illness or death. These concepts exist elsewhere, Maercker says. But they rarely take on such outsize significance — what he calls “almost a religious approach.”
A societal expectation of growth can put tremendous pressure on survivors to hide their suffering, Jayawickreme says... (MORE - missing details)