Resilience and thriving: issues, models, and linkages - Thriving: Broadening the Paradigm Beyond Illness to Health

The theme of this issue of the Journal is that the experience of adversity (serious stress or trauma, physical or psychological) can sometimes yield benefits to the person who experiences it. My contribution is to make conceptual distinctions among several related-but-not-identical experiences and to raise some issues about how to best conceptualize the topic under discussion. In the latter context I also consider one way of approaching the question of why some people seem to benefit from adversity whereas others do not. Finally, I review some constructs used in other areas of psychology that seem relevant to this topic.