Stress, Coping, and the Science of Resilience
Why do two people facing the same difficult moment—an exam, a job interview, a painful injury, an unraveling relationship—handle it so differently? One person may rise to the occasion, feeling energized and capable. Another may feel knocked flat, overwhelmed by the very same event. Our lab, led by Dr. Mark Seery, seeks to understand that gap: What makes people resilient in the face of stress, and what makes them vulnerable?
How We Study Stress
Rather than simply asking people how stressed they feel, we look at what their bodies are doing while stress is actually happening. As participants give speeches, solve difficult problems, or navigate tricky social interactions in our lab, we track their cardiovascular responses, including heart rate, blood pressure, and how efficiently the heart is pumping blood through the body.
These measures give us a window into people’s psychological states in real time, without interrupting them to ask what they’re thinking or relying on them to accurately put it into words. A racing heart paired with dilating blood vessels tells a very different story than a racing heart paired with constricting ones—the difference between feeling ready for a challenge and feeling threatened by it. This approach lets us catch the moment stress tips from something a person can rise to meet into something that starts to overwhelm them.
What We Explore
Self-esteem: Resource or liability? High self-esteem is usually treated as an unqualified good. Our research tells a more complicated story. We’ve found that self-esteem can help people speak up in the face of discrimination and can protect against endorsing troubling behavior after social rejection. But we’ve also found that when self-esteem is unstable or built on shaky footing, it can leave people more prone to self-doubt under pressure—and more likely to sabotage their own performance when a high-stakes moment threatens to reveal whether they’re truly as capable as they hope. Our work explores when self-esteem functions as a genuine resource, and when it quietly sets people up for destructive behavior.
Does past adversity build future strength? It’s tempting to assume that hardship simply wears people down. Our research suggests the picture is more nuanced. For example, people who’ve experienced some significant adversity in their lives often show more resilience later on than people who’ve experienced either very little adversity or a great deal of it. We’ve traced this pattern across everyday stress, chronic pain, and acute lab challenges. Across different contexts, we want to better understand how a manageable dose of hardship can build a kind of psychological toughness that carries over into whatever comes next.
Resilience through relationships. People don’t cope alone—they cope through the people and things they’re connected to. Feeling connected to something beyond yourself, whether another person or something vast and awe-inspiring, can change how manageable a stressor feels. For example, we study how romantic relationships shape and are shaped by stress, including factors that can drive partners closer together versus further apart. We’re also exploring experiences like awe—the feeling of encountering something vastly bigger than yourself—and how it can make looming stressors feel either more manageable or more daunting, depending on how a person relates to their own sense of self in that moment.
Support
Our research has been supported by funding from the National Science Foundation.