Research Stories

by Adelheid Fischer

For people living in many of the small towns sprinkled across the American heartland, hope is the kind of four-letter word that is rarely used to describe the future. Family farmers are a dying breed as are the merchants on Main Street.

Reynolds, Indiana is different. Although its population has dwindled to 533 souls, and there are more hogs in the fields than kids in the local schools, Reynolds is reinventing itself.

In 2005, the State of Indiana declared Reynolds a BioTown USA. The designation refers to the citizens' determination to kick their dependence on foreign oil. They generate power from resources in their own back yard–soybeans, used French fry oil, and pig manure. The residents are eager to embrace the future. More than 20 percent of them already have retrofitted their automobiles to run on alternative fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel.

This is the kind of "comeback-kid story" that gets the attention of researchers at Arizona State University. A group of ASU psychologists and social scientists are known as the Resilience Solutions Group (RSG). The group studies a human capacity that is as old as the Book of Job–the ability of people to right themselves after life breaks their stride with a blow like a two-by-four to the side of the head.

"Our goals, objectives, and hopes are challenged from time to time by some pretty severe events that can interrupt the flow of life and the future that a person envisions for himself," says Alex Zautra, an ASU professor of psychology.

"Part of resilience is sustaining one's interests, motivation, and direction. It's also the ability to bounce back, regain one's momentum, and find one's footing after having lost it," he says. "Resilience is measured by the speed and fullness of the recovery from difficulties."

Zautra cofounded the RSG in 2002 with John Hall, a public policy professor in the School of Public Affairs. At the time, Zautra was studying how older adults survived the crippling pain of arthritis. Specifically, he looked at how these people also found a way to manage their pain effectively with plenty of energy to spare for quality in their lives.

John Hall

During those studies, Zautra came across a sobering report that Hall had just published entitled "Coming of Age." Hall's study challenged Arizona's readiness to handle the coming demographic bulge in its elderly population. The two met to discuss their mutual interests.

"We asked ourselves, ‘What is the best sort of project or set of projects that could be done now to help prepare people to sustain their quality of life as they age?' Together we came up with the theme of resilience," Zautra says.

Since then, the concept of resilience has attracted a devoted core of nine faculty and a cadre of graduate students, most of them from ASU's psychology department. The group meets weekly to discuss many issues. They range from rethinking the training of volunteer caregivers who work with dying elders in hospice environments to studying the resourceful ways in which pregnant women on public assistance are able to navigate a complicated medical system.

But their discussions are no mere academic exercise. The group already has had a powerful effect on the delivery of social services in the Phoenix metro area. In 2004, Hall introduced Zautra to his longtime friend and colleague Roger Hughes, executive director of St. Luke's Health Initiative.

From the very first conversation, Hughes recalls, their ideas "were seminal in changing my way of thinking."

St. Luke's Health Initiative (SLHI) is a Phoenix-based public foundation devoted to improving the health of Arizonans. It supports community-development activities, health prevention and wellness programs, and health policy advocacy. Like most community-service organizations, its guiding philosophy was governed by what Hughes calls "a language of needs and deficits."

Zautra and Hall, on the other hand, offered an approach that stressed the idea of "starting with what you have, not with what you lack."

"It made me think about the way I raised my own kids," Hughes says. "You don't focus on their deficits and how to work on correcting them. You focus on their strengths and how to utilize them. So why do we use the language of deficits with communities? How we conceptualize and frame problems makes a huge difference in outcomes. If you reframe the question, you get different outcomes."

Hughes was so taken with the potential benefits of this changed way of thinking that he published a document in 2003 signaling the new direction that the foundation would take in the coming decade. Entitled "Resilience: Health in a New Key," the report provides a road map for how communities "can begin to build on their strengths instead of becoming prisoners of their weaknesses."

In 2006, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of its founding, SLHI held workshops to introduce local community groups to its changed philosophy. The foundation then reserved $1 million over and above its normal grant budget to fund proposals that pursued resilience-based solutions to community health problems. More than 90 proposals were submitted.

To keep the momentum going, SLHI regularly convenes the leaders of area nonprofit organizations in what Hughes calls "informal learning situations." These meetings help further resilience education and stimulate the formation of new agency partnerships.

RSG will soon make an impact on the national scene as well. In 2005, the National Institute on Aging awarded the ASU group a $2.2 million grant. The plan is to study an ethnically diverse group of 800 baby boomers between the ages of 45 and 65 in the Phoenix metro area.

Zautra says that RSG's goal is to determine what factors contribute to and enhance resiliency. This capacity for self-righting has been shown to be vital in sustaining both physical health and emotional well-being. Understanding how people and communities can tap this capacity has enormous personal and societal benefits. Many worry that the needs of the nation's 78 million baby boomers will to swamp the current healthcare system.

Zautra says that RSG's hallmark approach is "to recognize the strengths and acknowledge the capacities of the people you're working with." This idea will guide the spirit and the design of their study.

To gain both a more fine-grained and holistic glimpse into participants' lives, for example, researchers will ask them to keep a daily diary on laptop computers.

Among the topics queried are stresses that participants encountered during the day and their strategies for coping with them. At the same time, they also will be asked to list opportunities for sharing joy or helping others.

Similarly, researchers will conduct clinical interviews to obtain fairly predictable information such as levels of income and education or a history of mental and physical health. But the ASU scientists also will pose more unorthodox questions including asking participants to list traumatic events and describe their recovery from them.

Having had opportunities to practice resilience in the face of adversity, for example, may help to predict the suppleness of someone's coping response in the future. Zautra refers to such events as "capacity-building experiences that are fundamental to resilience."

He says that if a person can hark back to past experiences in which they were able to overcome difficulties, it's a great training ground for them. "They are able to feel confidence in their capacity to do it again."

As part of the study, scientists also will draw blood from participants. They want to gain a better understanding of the biochemistry of resilience, including the role played by an individual's physical makeup.

Kathryn Lemery is an RSG associate. She studies behavior genetics. Lemery plans to look at the function of one specific pair of genes in all participants. Scientists already know that these particular genes are responsible for influencing the levels of two important chemicals in the human brain. The chemicals are neurotransmitters–serotonin and dopamine.

Lemery says that these genes also have been shown to affect stress regulation and the incidence of depression. People who inherit a protective version of these genes may have an advantage in recovering from upending events more easily.

To test this idea, researchers will subject participants to a stressor, such as an unsolvable math problem. They will take saliva samples before, during, and after the test, and look for the presence of stress induced hormones. Lemery says she will pay particular attention to the level of stress hormones generated in response to the lab stressor. More importantly, she will measure the amount of time that these hormones circulate in the blood.

"A resilient individual will recover from the stressor very quickly," Lemery says. "That's most adaptive. It's taking less of your physiological resources. You're back to homeostasis and your body is ready for the next challenge."

Mary Davis and Linda Luecken are also RSG researchers. They will conduct additional tests in a laboratory setting. By tracking the physiological changes that mark recovery from stress, they hope to better understand the interconnections between mind and body that foster resilience.

But as Hall points out, resilience is not simply an expression of an individual's genetic inheritance, personal traits, or family dynamics.
"Resilience is not something you do alone," he says. "Social cohesion is vital to resilience. People need to feel that they're a part of something larger rather than just atoms in the universe."

Hall will study how facilities, programs, and activities on the community level all contribute to helping people rebound from adverse events. It can be something as simple as knowing that you can count on your neighbors to help in an emergency. Or it might involve redesigning a community's infrastructure in order to make it more navigable for elder residents.

The NIA has hailed RSG's multilevel project as "highly significant work that….cuts to the heart of the debate over resilience that has occupied researchers for decades."

"One developmental psychologist called resilience ‘the ordinary miracles of people,'" Zautra adds. "We need to have our finger on the pulse of those natural capacities."

Research by the Resilience Solutions Group is supported by the National Institute on Aging. The group is based at the ASU Downtown Center in Phoenix. For more information, call 480.727.8227. Send e-mail to rsg@asu.edu