 Our next speaker is Professor Alex Zautra, who is visiting us from our future tense partner, Arizona State University. Professor Zautra is the psychology professor there at ASU. He researches the role of stress and emotions on people's capacity to sustain well-being and recover from illness and other life challenges. Professor Zautra. Do I start this myself? Oh, just come on. Oh, great. Well, as a psychologist, I guess the question I'd like to ask you, primarily, is how the kinds of the ways we think about people and their capacities to adapt can help you design better cities, better companies, and better communities, I guess, in general. What I'm going to do today is basically give you an illustration of the methods, definitions of resilience, the methods we use to inquire about it, illustrating it with a study we're just about to complete on resilience in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Resilience is first defined, really, in psychology by a developmental psychologist, Mattson, who called it ordinary magic, which stressed the capacities of people, primarily most people, to recover, even children from the most traumatic experiences. Yet, of course, in psychology, we know there are differences between people, between communities that deserve study to inform public policy. Who are the resilient people? Where do they live? And what makes some more resilient than others are the kinds of questions we inquire about. The study I'm going to describe is one of resilience in midlife, and it looks to the... I look to provide you with a way of looking at the psychological methods of inquiry that you may find useful in your own work. So, this first slide gives you an idea of the way in which psychologists, or our group in particular, is defining resilience. And so, first of all, it's more than recovery. I mean, recovery, bouncing back, is pretty fundamental to defining what resilience is in the Oxford Dictionary. But it also means sustainability, which for, when defined for individuals and families and groups, it has to do with this keep-on-trucking kind of capacity. Sheri, we're talking a bit about that in hospitals too. So, when facing a crisis, we do put our current interests usually aside, but how quickly can we get back on track and not lose focus on what matters to us most? That is that sense of purpose that drives individual and group motivation. The third sort of ingredient of resilience that we will find useful is growth. And here we're talking about individual, but also family, community growth. And growth in this sense, I mean, in terms of learning, adapting to change, so becoming in case more stronger, more capable than you were before. So, in a sense, resilience is a directional vector toward the non-zero sum and using Robert Wright's terminology that people can become in facing and adapting to adversity stronger and more capable than they were before. And in that sense, growth from the experience. So, those are the three sort of dimensions or capacity of resilience that our group looks at. And the study I'm going to illustrate, used to illustrate some of these points is the study we're just finishing I mentioned in resilience in midlife in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Now, why do we study middle age? Well, first of all, it's a major demographic group that's with increasing health needs. Second, middle age is when healthy and ill populations begin to diverge and the vulnerabilities to chronic illness become evident, but also maybe the resilience resources within the person and in their relationships with others also become more evident. So, I guess I better advance the slide so you know what I'm talking about here. So, in this particular study, we studied 800 people in 40 Phoenix metropolitan neighborhoods over the last five years funded thanks National Institute on Aging for this study, for the funds to do this study. So, we examined forces both good and bad within individuals and their social worlds and distinguished those who successfully adapt to adversity from those who do not. So, this wheel gives you an idea of the kinds of variables we study. It includes the study of place, stresses both the intensity and nature of stresses on the people's lives, the individual differences both in personality and genetic profiles, and physiological temper of the person that we study. So, one of the questions we ask is, how does neighborhood or community matter for resilience? These are those points I just made. And, of course, Phoenix metropolitan area being a big place, this consists not just of one community, but many different types of communities. So, one of the first things we did was define with the help of a geographer, Pat Grober, the community types that we're dealing with in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Here we used ethnic mix, median age, and whether or not there's a child in the home. Those of us who are now empty nesters, we know the difference between having a child in the home and one not, both benefit and loss. We randomly selected four census areas from each of these 10 types, and then we interviewed 10 men and 10 women from each of the census tracts. That means 10 types, four tracts in each type, randomly selected, and 20 people per track or those to 800 people. One of the big questions when examining the capacities of people to be resilient is resilience is always a response to change, stressful change. So, focus has to be in part on what types of stressors and how intense they are in the populations that we're investigating. Stress has come in many varieties, and these are just some examples here. Job loss, for example, includes not only financial strain, but a challenge to ego identity. Marital strife often leads to family and crisis, and it's often the most difficult to adapt to. Why? Because social identity is challenged fundamentally by marital strife. One not up on this list but is also evident in the study of people between the ages of 40 and 65 as they move toward older age is increasing chronic illness and how people adapt to chronic illness and adjust their lives to sustain themselves is pretty fundamentally questioned to ask ourselves in this community. Whether it's chronic pain from arthritis or fatigue from drugs for the treatment of another illness, these are substantially important stressors that shape the lives of middle-aged people. So how do we do it? One way we do it is with questionnaires. So we give people four self-report questionnaires to fill out. They spend about two and a half hours doing this. We pay them about $120 apiece just to fill out the questionnaires. Some are on neighborhood, some are on social connections, current ones. We also look at childhood attachment and trauma and then measures of personality. We employ telephone interviews for each of these people. In the telephone interviews, we ask people to discuss the most stressful event in their lives and we've recorded those. We now have 800 stories of resilience from Arizona residents and we're beginning to unwrap the narratives of those people to help inform us about the qualitative nature of resilience because often people will say, yes, I grew or I learned or I recovered completely, but the quality of their answers provides us with a great deal more detail about the quality of their resilient responses. So we use other measures as well. I'll just alert you to these. We do home visits because we do collect blood samples. We do genetic profiles. We identify stress hormones and immune markers for the population. We do daily diaries because, well, measures of everyday life. Well, adaptation is often played out in daily life. We measure mood, smaller, everyday stresses, and physical symptoms as they occur in a person's everyday life. We have lab measures so we can provide an experimental induction of stress. We ask people to report on interpersonal stresses as well as we give them a physical stressor to see how well their body and their mind sort of recovers following the stressors, both physiologically through measures like blood pressure but also psychologically by looking at their positive and negative emotional responses. Okay, so for example, now we've just unpacked some of the data and we looked at subjective reports of neighborhood. Now here is a diagram of the analyses of their reports of neighborhood and in this case, we have two factors, neighborhood connectedness, which is like Putnam's measures of weak ties, but also neighborhood disorder, includes measures of fear of crime, physical mess, and social disconnection. The one point I want to make about this is every neighborhood can be defined by multiple indicators. These two major constructs, they are correlated negatively, but neighborhoods often will either be high in both, they could be low in both, or they can have one or and or the other. So it's important to look both at the strengths of a neighborhood, this is connectedness, but also its vulnerabilities, this sense of disorder. We've also done the same thing with our measures of social support. Now, this is a model of friend support, or lack thereof, social support, and these are the kinds of questions we ask, degree to which others, friends, they care for me, or they understand me, et cetera, but also negative social ties. They're critical of my behavior, they take advantage of me, they break promises of help. Now, they provoke feelings of conflict. The important point here is again, when we unpack relationships, in our study we do friends, family, work, but also spouse and significant other, is there are negatively correlated but separable constructs that define the positives and the negatives of everyday social life, just like in neighborhoods. And these are useful to study because one is not the opposite of the other, it's not a single dimension of influence in the life of people. Now, the question we ask ourselves in this study from a psychological point of view is how do we know when people are doing well? And in psychiatric epidemiology, for example, we'd be interested in distress and psychopathology and we do measure that. But in public health per se, we'd be interested in physical functioning. How well can the person continue to get up in the morning and get to work or to engage in activities that are meaningful to them? In the study of normal people, it's quality of life or degree of well-being that we're concerned with, and for resilience as outcomes, we think that all three of these dimensions are pretty fundamental. Now, when we model this with the data at hand from those 800 people, here's other constructs and they're built on measures from self-report. Psychological well-being, psychological distress and physical functioning. The correlations are fairly high, but still each construct is separable for the other, which means a person can be highly distressed, but they can still find a sense of vitality and making life purposeful and meaningful to them. A person can be low in physical functioning but still be psychologically equipped to have a good day. It's important to study these differential aspects of well-being, distress, and physical functioning, and this is the approach we're taking as we go forward. Now, you can imagine, we're relating these three constructs, well-being, distress, and physical functioning to our measures of neighborhood, both the demographic identification of neighborhood types, but also the self-reports of neighborhood disorder but also neighborhood connectedness. How do those relate to these outcomes and how do they provide the preservation of well-being and lowering distress and physical functioning in the face of major stressful events? Because actually when you think about resilience, it really ought to be always measured in response. It's fundamentally proven when the person can cope successfully, adapt well to the stressful experiences. So we use those stressors as sort of the medium by which we can display whether or not our measures of personality and social well-being and or social disorder determine the variables that matter in who ends up with a resilient profile and who doesn't. So what are the practical uses of big community studies like these? Well, here's some ideas anyway, but I think mostly the ideas come from what you might think is useful for many aspects of what I've talked about today. Social cohesion, for example, developed projects like the City of Phoenix is doing in community gardening that can foster weak ties in those communities that need them the most. We can identify which communities perhaps need them the most and which ones may be most open to those kinds of interventions building community from the ground up. We're currently involved in developing social intelligence training because we think relationships are really pretty fundamental. We're guessing, in fact, that those will prove to be the strongest predictors of well-being and physical functioning in our group. So we're building and testing a training program for those people in need, those in transition, for example, freshmen in college, retirees leaving the workforce and facing the social dislocation and organizations that rely on strong social ties like Fireman, for example. Informing volunteer programs, building mentoring programs between young and old is another example of how we can tie data about well-being and distress and resilient outcomes to programs that can help facilitate those outcomes in the future. Lastly, you name it, whatever you think might be most valuable. Thank you.