 Psychological stress comes in many different shapes, including loss, relationship problems, conflict, financial problems, and poverty. And what those really diverse experiences all share is that when they're extreme or chronic, they can have devastating effects on our health. They can, for example, increase depression, anxiety, insomnia, cardiovascular illness, dementia risk, and even untimely death. And so the implications for human suffering and public health are obvious. And you probably personally know somebody who has experienced some of those devastating effects of stress. But you probably also know somebody who's experienced just as much stress, but who has overcome or avoided the harmful effects of stress. In social psychology, we would call that a resilient person. So we can't avoid stress. Stress is a human universal, but how people respond to stress shows great variation across people. And so the question is, what is it about resilient people that helps them overcome the adverse or avoid the adverse effects of stress? And at first glance, you might think, oh, they're just tougher, stronger than the rest of us. But the data suggests that that isn't necessarily the case. So what is it then about resilient people? And to understand that question, we have to understand stress. What is it that makes stress harmful in the long run? And what seems to be at the heart of what makes stress stressful are emotions. And specifically, an abundance of negative emotions like sadness, anger, hopelessness, and an absence of positive emotions like strength or joy. And so to avoid the negative effects of stress, we may need to get a handle on this toxic ingredient regulate these emotions, decrease the negative and increase the positive. Intuitively, this can seem like an impossible task, especially when we're facing powerful stressors like losing a loved one. So is emotion regulation really just a nice theory, or can we put it into practice? And that's the question that we ask in my lab. Can people control or regulate their emotions? If so, how might they be able to do this? And is emotion regulation truly a key to resilience? One particularly promising avenue to regulating our emotions is one that relies on the human potential to not just receive meaning, but to actively create meaning. What do I mean by that? So let's go back to the example of losing a loved one. That's a devastating event that we could see as something that marks us for life, a life sentence that we will never overcome. But we could also shift our perspective on that event, seeing it as a really sad and devastating one, but one that's a really important and meaningful part of human existence and that can connect us to other people. And in psychology, we call that process reappraisal. Now in my lab, we measure people's capacity to use reappraisal by bringing them in the lab and then we show them evocative stimuli like very sad film clips. And then we ask participants to change the meaning of what they're seeing and we measure their emotions in terms of their physiology and people's experience. Some people are really good at that when we ask them to do this in the lab. Some people are in the middle and then some people are really bad at that. And then we follow those same people over time and we see how they do as they face stressors like a divorce. Turns out the people who are good at reappraisal, they're the ones who are more resilient. They're less depressed and in fact, they sometimes are indistinguishable from low stress counterparts as though they manage to neutralize stress. So why are some people better at reappraisal than others? One answer lies in the fundamental beliefs that people hold about their emotions. Some people believe that fundamentally you cannot control emotions and other people believe that you can control your emotions. And those are the people who are more proficient at using reappraisal. What have we learned? First, humans have quite amazing potential to be resilient. Second, emotion regulation is a key to human resilience. And third, reappraisal changing what stress means can improve our emotions and almost like a good diet over time make us more resilient. And really, this William James quote sums it up in a sentence, the greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another. And in closing, I want to ask you a question which is how do you think we can use these insights to improve people's ability to be resilient?