Personality science, resilience, and posttraumatic growth

PASTOR represents an innovative development in the study of resilience. This commentary highlights how PASTOR can help both clarify critical questions in and benefit from engaging with new research in personality science on behavioral flexibility across situations in addition to stability over time, and also clarify the relationship between resilience and posttraumatic growth

A qualitative investigation into the cultural master narrative for overcoming trauma and adversity in the United Kingdom.

esearch in the field of narrative psychology has found that redemption—a narrative sequence in which people recount emotionally negative experiences as having positive endings—is a useful mechanism for coping with adversity. Redemption has been viewed as a cultural master narrative in North America, providing individuals with a socially valued script for narrating challenging life experiences. Presently little research has examined the presence and function of the redemption narrative outside of North American contexts. The aim of this qualitative study, therefore, was to identify themes in U.K. individuals’ narratives of trauma and adversity to gain insight into the content of the master narrative for meaning-making in the U.K. Sixty-five participants (57 females, Mage = 21.97, SD = 7.24) with little to no experience of lifetime adversity were recruited into an online survey. Participants answered open-ended questions adopting the perspective of a survivor from a selected U.K. national tragedy, focusing on how they felt survivors could recover from trauma. We identified 2 themes in our thematic analysis that were relevant to recovery: recuperation and redemption. Recuperation was most commonly reported, it was described as a gradual lessening of symptoms over time and the ability to cope with the lasting emotional and physical scars. Our findings suggest that redemption is not necessarily the dominant cultural script in the U.K. for guiding recovery in the aftermath of trauma. (APA PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved

Interdependent Transformations: Integrating Insights from Relationship Science to Advance Post-Traumatic Growth and Personality Change Research

People have a tremendous ability to grow and change for the better following adverse life events. This capacity for growth has captured the attention of psychologists interested in understanding the mechanisms underpinning both personality and well-being. This paper advocates for a greater integration of relationship science into this area of study as a means of advancing post-traumatic growth and personality change research. Relationships, both as an impetus for change and as evidence of growth, have featured consistently in the post-traumatic growth and adversity literatures. Drawing from interdependence theory in particular, this paper highlights how the unique structure of close relationships and relationship dynamics can be applied to address outstanding theoretical questions related to the advancement of post-traumatic growth research, as well as offers a critique of the practice of using relationship outcomes (e.g., connection) as evidence of post-traumatic growth. Finally,this paper encourages psychologists across subdisciplines to share their unique skills and insights to help generate more robust psychological theories and methods

Examining the Longitudinal Associations Between Repeated Narration of Recent Transgressions Within Individuals’ Romantic Relationships and Character Growth in Empathy, Humility, and Compassion

This prospective longitudinal study examined whether repeated written narration of relational transgressions was associated with increases in empathy, humility, and compassion over 1 year. Although engagement in reflective and meaning-making processing styles has been theorized to facilitate adversarial growth existing research has been limited by methodological issues and has yet to examine whether this mechanism is associated with character trait changes over time. Participants provided ratings of trait empathy, humility, and compassion in 5 waves at 3-month intervals. In Wave 2, participants provided a written narrative describing a recent relational transgression against their romantic partner. Participants then engaged in repeated narration of recent romantic transgressions in Waves 3 through 5. The narratives were coded for redemption, positive self-event connections, and degree of personal responsibility taken. Linear growth curve models were used to examine the extent to which these narrative themes were associated with character growth. Overall, there was little consistent and robust evidence across models that narration was associated with changes in empathy, humility, and compassion. The implications for research into adversarial growth are discussed in reference to the appropriateness of operationalizing adversarial growth as character growth and the extent to which relational transgressions can facilitate adversarial growth

Integrating ecology and technology to create innovative pest control devices

Blackie, H., MacMorran, D., Shapiro, L., Woodhead, I., Diegel, O., Murphy, E., Eason, C.T

Synthesis of triazole-linked 2-trichloromethylquinazolines and exploration of their efficacy against P. falciparum

Using 2-trichloromethylquinazoline as scaffold, seven novel triazole-linked compounds have been synthesized using CuAAC chemistry. The in vitrobiological activity of four of the compounds on the Plasmodium falciparumchloroquine-sensitive strain NF54 was then determined. The compounds which were tested showed moderate activity with 1.45 /iM as the lowest inhibitory concentration

Finding character strengths through loss: an extension of Peterson and Seligman (2003)

People can experience positive changes even in the midst of adversity and loss. We investigated character strengths following three recent shooting tragedies. Using an Internet database of respondents to the Values in Action Inventory of Strengths (VIA-IS), we compared responses from three groups of participants (N = 31,429) within close proximity of each event: those who completed it eight months prior to the event, and one month and two months after. Results suggested that for one of the events, participants who completed the VIA-IS after the event showed slightly different levels of self-reported character strengths compared to participants who completed the VIA-IS before the event, with some mean levels higher and others lower. The observed differences in character strengths were inconsistent across follow-up periods, and effect sizes were small (d values from –0.13 to 0.15). These findings raise questions about whether and how tragedies might catalyze differences in character strengths

The development of a light-weight, long-life diphacinone rodent bait

Ross, J.G., Eason, C.T., Sam, S., Shapiro, L., Blackie, H., MacMorran, D., Aylett, P., Tucker, N., Razzaq, H

Retrieving and retaining older and advancing novel rodenticides-as alternatives to anticoagulants

Eason, C.T., Henderson, R., Murphy, E., Shapiro, L., MacMorran, D., Blackie, H., Brimble, M., Conole, D., Rennison, D., Gibson, T.J., Gregory N.G