It's OK to Not Be OK

Everyone gets a little rain in their lives, at some point.  I survived breast cancer, my husband was recently treated for colon cancer (not to mention the aneurysm he has on his aorta and leg, which must be surgically removed) and his recently-acquired rheumatoid arthritis.  We have no relationship with either of our families and our son is growing up (with older parents) pretty much just with us.  I live in fear that we will both be gone when he is still too young to manage on his own (he's 17).

But people have other disappointments, too -- losing a job, or a loved one, the failure of a relationship.

But a new study says that how you respond to adversity can affect how you get through it, according to newswise.com.  

Research on how adults deal with adversity has been dominated by studies claiming the most common response is uninterrupted and stable psychological functioning. In other words, this research suggests that most adults are essentially unfazed by major life events such as spousal loss or divorce. These provocative findings have also received widespread attention in the popular press and media.

The idea that most adults are minimally affected by adversity worries Frank Infurna and Suniya Luthar, of the Arizona State University Department of Psychology, because it disagrees with other research on how adults respond to adversity and could negatively affect people living through adversity. Infurna and Luthar closely examined the research studies and found problems with how studies were designed and how the data were analyzed. 

The study identified the discrepancy between previous research on adult responses to adversity to this one, reports that have turned out to now contradict 80 years of research in child development. Infurna, an associate professor of psychology, is an expert on using complex statistical models to study health and well-being in adulthood and old age. Luthar, a Foundation Professor of Psychology, is an international expert on resilience in children, with 30 years of experience and highly influential publications on the concept of resilience and how best to study it.

“As experts, the onus is on us to be careful about how research is conducted and communicated,” Luthar says. “There has been a message percolating in the popular press that most people are unaffected by major life events like bereavement or a deployment, but that is not the whole picture.”

The project started over two years ago, when Infurna downloaded publicly-available data for re-analysis. The data had been analyzed using “growth mixture modeling” – a statistical model that can classify how different people in a population respond to adversity. After classifying the study participants into groups based on their response to adversity, the model outputs the response patterns for each group.

Infurna and Luthar noticed the results depended on how the model was set up in the software used for statistical analysis. Setting up a model for data analysis requires a researcher to define some assumptions, or educated guesses about aspects of the model like how the data are organized or how much error was included in the experimental measurements. The assumptions identified as problematic by Infurna and Luthar were that the variations in the data were the same for the entire participant group and that the psychological functioning of all participants changed at the same rate. These assumptions also corresponded to the default settings in several software programs commonly used for statistical analysis. When the default software settings were used to run the growth mixture model, the most common response pattern was a flat line, which indicated stable and largely uninterrupted psychological functioning after adversity.

When the growth mixture models were set up with more appropriate assumptions, the researchers found the most common response pattern was a temporary decrease followed by an increase. Such a response pattern indicates a decline in psychological functioning followed by a return to normal, which agrees with 80 years of resilience research in children. This response pattern also agrees with the conventional wisdom that in general, most people struggle to some degree after a major life event and recover after a period of time.

“The idea that ‘it is okay to not be okay’ following adversity is important,” Infurna said. “Sometimes it can take months or years to recover after a traumatic or upsetting event because resilience depends on the person and the resources they have available to them, their past experiences and the type of adverse event.”