Salvatore R. Maddi

University of California, Irvine | UCI ·  Department of Psychology and Social Behavior

The personality variables of hardiness and grit are conceptualized as helpful to people in dealing effectively with challenging stressful circumstances. In a relevant study (Maddi, Matthews, Kelly, Villarreal, & White, 2012) at the United States Military Academy at West Point, cadets were measured for hardiness and grit before they began their trai...

Hardiness is a personality pattern of attitudes and strategies that helps people turn life’s ongoing stresses from potential disasters into growth opportunities instead. The hardy attitudes are commitment (you want to stay involved with others and circumstances), control (you want to keep trying to influence outcomes), and challenge (you see life a...

In previous research, hardiness has been shown to be positively related to good performance, well-being, and sense of fulfillment. The relevant samples have included college students, working adults, and military and safety personnel. The present study e...

Hardiness is the personality pattern of attitudes and strategies that helps people turn stressful circumstances from potential disasters into growth opportunities. To do this, the hardiness attitudes of commitment, control, and challenge constitute the necessary courage, and the hardiness strategies of problem-solving coping, socially supportive in...

Life is by its nature stressful, and this emphasizes the importance of Hardiness, which is the pattern of attitudes and strategies that help one to turn stresses from potential disasters into growth opportunities instead. This chapter summarizes the conceptualization, research, assessment, training, and practice of Hardiness. This summary shows tha...

This chapter emphasizes hardiness at the organizational level. This is especially important in our changing times, in which it has become more difficult for organizations to turn adversity into opportunity, fulfill obligations to customers, and keep the best personnel. Discussed is how organizations need hardiness in their culture, climate, structu...

Life is by its nature a changing, and therefore stressful, phenomenon. One source of stress is the ongoing developmental process that starts with birth, and continues until death. The other source of stress is megatrends imposed by circumstances beyond our control, especially in our changing times. Together, these ongoing stresses need to be turned...

The nature of the interaction between parents and their young is very important, as hardiness has been shown to be learned. As to the hardy attitudes, socially supportive interactions lead to a sense of commitment, early environments permitting mastery lead to a sense of control, and ongoing changes construed as richness of experience lead to a sen...

Together, the hardiness attitudes and strategies facilitate resilience under stress. The hardy attitudes are the 3Cs of commitment, control, and challenge. No matter how bad things get, challenge helps you realize that life is naturally stressful, commitment helps you stay involved with what is going on around you, and control helps you try to turn...

This chapter concerns how military and safety work roles impose especially stressful circumstances on personnel. These stresses include threats to life, violence requirements, and excessive separation from family life. In these stressful circumstances, hardiness attitudes and strategies have an especially important role in maintaining effective and...

The measure of the hardy attitudes has gone through several improvements, and is now an 18 item scale called the Personal Views Survey III-R. Research has shown that the test is a valid indicator of commitment, control, and challenge, which together constitute the hardy attitudes. This test is a positive predictor of various indices of performance...

This chapter concerns hardiness training in adolescence and adulthood. In this, it covers primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention. Primary and secondary prevention emphasizes hardiness assessment and training in schools. Hardiness assessment and training in counseling emphasizes tertiary prevention. Also covered is the approach to obtaining sch...

In our time of turbulent change, we need to emphasize the psychology of possibility, rather than complacent security. We need to welcome change as an opportunity to grow and develop.

This chapter considers the role of personality hardiness in helping people turn stressful circumstances from potential disasters into growth opportunities. Hardiness is conceptualized as the existential courage that facilitates facing stresses directly and learning from transforming them to advantage. In this explanation, life is considered to be a...

Hardiness is conceptualized as the courage that protects against such effects of denial and avoidance of life’s stressors as internet addiction, excessive consumer spending, and gambling. Also relevant protections may be grit, and emotional intelligence (EI). This study compares the relative effectiveness of these three aspects of personality on th...

This chapter concerns hardiness assessment and training. With regard to assessments, the development over many years of an effective questionnaire measure is emphasized. Most of this work concerned the hardiness attitudes of commitment, control, and challenge, as measured by the Personal Views Survey III-R. This measure has also been included along...

Emphasized is the hardiness approach to turning stresses into growth and development. It is important to recognize the inherently changing nature of relationships and work situations, and to immerse yourself in this. This takes the courage of hardy attitudes, and the hard work of hardy strategies. One must learn through failures as well as successe...

The American Psychological Foundation (APF) Gold Medal Awards recognize distinguished and enduring records of accomplishment in four areas of psychology: the application of psychology, the practice of psychology, psychology in the public interest, and the science of psychology. The 2011 recipient of the Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in Psyc...

Although it has emerged as a factor in performance effectiveness in both working adults and college students, hardiness has also been shown to be related to other factors that may well also be related to performance effectiveness. Consequently, attempts need to be made to determine whether the relationship to performance of hardiness is anything mo...

We examined the relative effectiveness of hardiness and grit as predictors of performance and retention among first year cadets at the USMA. Based on past research and theory, we expected that both hardiness and grit would predict unique variance in performance and retention even after controlling for past performance as measured by the Whole Candi...

The chapter conceptualizes hardiness as the existential courage that facilitates being able to turn stresses from potential disasters into growth opportunities. In this explanation, life is assumed to be an inherently stressful phenomenon, involving ongoing developmental requirements, which get added to imposed megatrends. In all of this, the hardy...

In the past 25 years, personality hardiness has been emphasized as a composite of the interrelated attitudes of commitment, control, and challenge that together provide the existential courage and motivation to turn stressful circumstances from potential disasters into growth opportunities. As such, hardiness has become considered the pathway to re...

Drugs used in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, have many serious side effects. This study investigated the potential therapeutic effect of the combination of angiotensin receptor blocker (losartan) with low dose of glucocorticoid (dexamethasone) in ameliorating joint dysfunction arising from adjuvant arthritis (AA) in comparison with the effe...

In 25 years of research and practice, hardiness has emerged as a pattern of attitudes and skills that is a pathway to resilience under stressful circumstances. As such, it is important to determine whether hardiness can be trained, and if such training improves performance and health. The few relevant studies available thus far have suggested this...

Personality hardiness has emerged as a composite of the interrelated attitudes of commitment, control, and challenge that provides the existential courage and motivation to turn stressful circumstances from potential disasters into growth opportunities. This study contributes to the construct validity of the latest measure of hardiness, the Persona...

Comments on an article by King and Hicks which looked at disruptions of expectations and goals as potentially useful developmental pressures. They emphasized imposed, dramatic stresses (e.g., an unexpected divorce or having one's child born with Down syndrome), but they also meant to include more ordinary, developmental stresses (e.g., leaving home...

Hardiness is a pattern of attitudes and skills that provides the courage and strategies to turn stressful circumstances from potential disasters into growth opportunities instead. As such, hardiness is particularly relevant to inherently stressful settings, such as military service. First, theory and research on hardiness assessment and training is...

Comments on the original article "A New Big Five: Fundamental Principles for an Integrative Science of Personality," by Dan P. McAdams and Jennifer L. Pals (see record 2006-03947-002 ). In presenting their view of personality science, McAdams and Pals (April 2006) elaborated the importance of five principles for building an integrated science of pe...

The recent emphasis on positive psychology is welcome, and has spurred much relevant research. But, there are still many unresolved conceptual and research issues, which seem to be increasing rather than decreasing. This highlights the importance of conceptually more detailed and comprehensive approaches, so that development of the field can be has...

The recent emphasis on positive psychology is welcome, and has spurred much relevant research. But, there are still many unresolved conceptual and research issues, as more variables are being proposed as relevant. As part of this process, the present paper proposes hardiness as an addition to positive psychology. Hardiness is a combination of attit...

Both hardiness and religiousness share spirituality, in the sense of searching for meaning in one's life, and have been shown to have a buffering effect on stresses that maintains and enhances performance, morale, and health. This study investigates how hardiness and religiousness compare in their relationship to depression, anger, and the coping a...

Personality research has functioned under the prevailing influence of middle-level theorizing sufficiently long to justify consideration of the effects of this approach. Despite improvements in precision and testability of hypotheses, with resulting increases in volume of research, the pervasive effect of several practical dangers of middle-level t...

Comments on "A tale of two visions: Can a new view of personality help integrate psychology?" by J. D. Mayer (see record 2005-05480-001). Mayer's attempt to find ways to use personality emphases as integrative tendencies in psychology is welcome. Certainly, it would help if the research and practice efforts of psychologists were coordinated more cl...

Previous research has established hardiness as a dispositional factor in preserving and enhancing performance and health despite stressful circumstances. The present four studies continue this construct-validational process by (a) introducing a shortened version of the hardiness measure and (b) testing hypotheses concerning the relationship between...

This study aimed to measure three rationally distinct forms of the need for variety as expressed in thematic apperception, and to obtain the relatic ships among them and between each of them and other variables with which the should or should not be correlated. Sixty-two male subjects were tested fox all variables. The relationships among the three...

There is certainly an accumulation of evidence indicating that hardiness is a key to transforming stressful circumstances from potential disasters into growth opportunities instead. As to the emerging question of whether there are demographic and cultural differences in the role of hardiness, there are only a few relevant findings at this time. Alt...

Comments on George Bonanno's article entitles Loss, Trauma, and Human Resilience: Have We Underestimated the Human Capacity to Thrive After Extremely Aversive Events? (see record 2004-10043-003). The author of this comment notes that Bonanno's article is a compelling analysis of several different reactions to extremely aversive events. With regard...

Existential psychologists emphasize the ongoing search for meaning in life that involves us in the ubiquitous decision-making process. Regardless of content, each decision involves choosing a future, unfamiliar path, or repeating a past, familiar path. Although choosing the future is most consistent with continuing to elaborate life’s meaning, it a...

Since 1979, the development of the hardiness approach to enhancing performance and health has been facilitated by continual cross-fertilization between theorizing, research, and practice. At first, hardiness emerged from individual differences research on stress reactions as the attitudes of commitment, control, and challenge. Since then, extensive...

We evaluated the effectiveness of hardiness training in improving the retention rates and grade-point averages offirst-semester high-risk undergraduates. Undergraduates in the experimental group underwent hardiness training as a regular semester course. The control group consisted of demographically comparable undergraduates who underwent either a...

Theory and research are suggesting that personality hardiness is a composite of interrelated attitudes of commitment, control, and challenge that facilitates the management of stressful circumstances by turning them into growth-inducing rather than debilitating experiences. The two studies reported here seek to further our understanding of the over...

Although there has been some disagreement, there is growing evidence now that psychopathology is a comorbidity of morbid obesity among patients seeking bariatric surgery. The aim of this study was to determine whether psychopathology decreases following this surgery. Utilizing a national sample, this study focused on pre- and post-surgery scores on...

Since 1979, the development of the hardiness approach to enhancing performance and health has been facilitated by continual cross-fertilization between theorizing, research, and practice. At first, hardiness emerged from individual differences research on stress reactions as the attitudes of commitment, control, and challenge. Since then, extensive...

Through research and practice over the past 20 years, hardiness has emerged as a personality disposition that enhances performance, conduct, morale, stamina, and health. This article furthers the construct validity of hardiness theorizing and assessment by determining the role of hardiness in moment-to-moment experiencing, coping, and strain reacti...

The author discusses the history and current status of the hardiness approach to enhancing performance, conduct, morale, stamina, and health, and comments on the articles appearing in the Spring 1999 special issue of Consulting Psychology Journal. Observations are made about the future of hardiness and its participation in a new emphasis on person...

These studies focused on the differences between hardiness (HAR) and optimism in their relationship to transformational coping ([TC]; e.g., problem solving, planning) and regressive coping (e.g., disengagement, stoicism). Specifically, it was hypothesized that the pattern of involvement in TC and avoidance coping is clearer in HAR than in optimism....

Our turbulent times require organizations that are hardy in the sense of having cultures, climates, structures, and workforces capable of turning potentially disruptive changes into opportunities. At the individual, or workforce, level, hardiness involves the attitudes of commitment, control, and challenge and the complementary skills of coping and...

Personality hardiness has emerged in research as an important buffer in the stress-illness relationship. Little, however is known about the antecedents in early experience. Based on conceptualizations in existential psychology and research on the resilient child, the present study tested hypotheses implicating stresses, compensatory family standard...

This paper explains how the hardiness approach has had an impact on psychology and related fields. It states that in this process, the development of the hardiness approach to enhancing performance and health has been facilitated by continual cross-fertilization between theorizing, research, and practice. It first emerged from individual difference...

Recent research (e.g., S. C. Funk, 1992; S. R. Maddi, 1989) has suggested that hardiness protects wellness and stimulates effective functioning despite stressful circumstances. This study continued evaluation of the effectiveness of a hardiness training program. With 54 managers as participants, the hardiness training condition was compared with a...

Although several studies have documented the existence of psychopathology in the morbidly obese, there is disagreement as to its extent and nature. The disagreement has been difficult to resolve because earlier studies have tended to use small, regional samples, and diverse, unstandardized approaches to measuring psychopathology. To add clarity, th...

Argues that whatever their specific area, organizations combine employees or members into teams for effectiveness in providing goods and services. This requires a task orientation. Within psychology, it is the industrial/organizational stance that most readily fits this emphasis on providing goods and services. As more clinical psychologists engage...

Argues that whatever their specific area, organizations combine employees or members into teams for effectiveness in providing goods and services. This requires a task orientation. Within psychology, it is the industrial/organizational stance that most readily fits this emphasis on providing goods and services. As more clinical psychologists engage...

Previous theorizing and construct-validational research suggest that hardiness expresses psychological vitality and enhanced performance. Now that there is a psychometrically adequate, short measure of hardiness, it is worthwhile to investigate whether it is a quick index of mental health. Consequently, the relationship between hardiness and clinic...

Some of the original studies of hardiness by Kobasa and Maddi and their colleagues in Chicago were characterized by a lack of explicit acknowledgment that samples were drawn from the same large population of business executives and by insufficient information on the number, varying nature, and timing of observations of these research participants....

In academic circles, the past 20 years have shown a decline in the influence of personality theorizing. For the first part of that period, the person-situation debate fulminated, with the social psychologists and behaviorists joining with some in the personality field to argue that situation rather than person variables account for behavior. Althou...

This article presents a conceptual and empirical reply to the study by Schroeder and Costa (1984) that reported relations between stressful life events and physical illness are artifacts of contamination in the events measure by neurotic, subjective, and physical health influences. The present study considers potential conceptual exaggerations that...

The effects of the resistance resources of personality hardiness, exercise, and social support, taken singly and in combination, on concurrent and prospective levels, and probability of illness were studied. In 1980, 85 male business executives identified as high in stressful events were tested for the three resistance resources. Predicting their i...

The study examined the relationship between the Type A behavior pattern and personality hardiness and predicted an interaction between the two that would be influential for illness onset. Type A and hardiness were found to be conceptually different and empirically independent factors. Under high stressful life events, male executives who were high...

This study examined exercise and personality-based hardiness as independent buffers of the stressful event-illness relationship. Self-report measures of exercise, hardiness, stressful events and illness were obtained from 137 male business executives. Hardiness and exercise each interact with stressful events in decreasing illness. Further, subject...

Tested the hypothesis that attitudes of alienation inhibit intrinsically motivated exploration of an unfamiliar but ordinary environment. 29 university students completed measures including the Alienation Test and the Maudsley Personality Inventory, and their exploratory behavior was observed during a mock waiting period. Stepwise multiple regressi...

Utilizing a prospective design, this study considers the mediating effects of personality-based hardiness (commitment, control, and challenge) and constitutional predisposition (parents' illness) on the stressful life events-illness relationship. The subjects are middle- and upper-level managers who filled out questionnaires covering a period of fi...

Hypothesized that hardiness—commitment, control, and challenge—functions to decrease the effect of stressful life events to producing illness symptoms. 259 upper- and middle-level male managers (mean age 48 yrs) were administered a battery of tests (including Rotter's Internal–External Locus of Control Scale, the Schedule of Life Events, and the Se...

The concept of intrinsic motivation, championed by D. E. Berlyne, has by now taken root in psychology. Whether deprived of nutrients or not, both animals and humans will display considerable curiosity and play, and will actually work for no other reward than gaining information about the environment. Further, intrinsically motivated activities have...

The notion that life stresses and personality have an interactive role in illness is part of the wisdom of the ages. Most past research has studied either life stresses or personality. A model for understanding health/illness status is presented that includes stressful life events and the resistance resources of personality, social supports, coping...

Over the last 25 years, hardiness has emerged in psychology as a pattern of attitudes that facilitates turning stressful circumstances from potential disasters into growth opportunities (Maddi, 1994, 1998, 2002). These attitudes of hardiness constitute the courage and motivation to face and transform stressors, rather than to deny or to catastrophi...

overall thrust toward possibility decision-making process facticity due to insurmountable limitations facticity due to experiential agreement minimizing facticity through symbolization, imagination, and judgment / when symbolization, imagination, and judgment fail personality hardiness as the opposite of inferiority feelings can others...

Hypothesized a moderate positive relationship between the general outlook factor, personality hardiness, and basketball performance. 37 male high school basketball players completed a hardiness test (S. R. Maddi, 1987) that yielded not only a total score, but also part scores for commitment, control, and challenge. Also, 8 indices of basketball per...

Incluye bibliografía e índice

A classic in the field of personality since 1968, "Personality Theories: A Comparative Analysis," Fifth Edition, retains its highly successful comparative approach. The book discusses and analyzes modern and classic theories of personality and compares and contrasts them in order to illuminate the overall models of human behavior they express. Diff...

This is an attempt to clarify existential literature by distinguishing among the relevant behavioral manifestations those that are psychopathological and those that signify mental health. Existential neurosis emerges as chronic meaninglessness, apathy, and aimlessness. The premorbid identity out of which this neurosis may come involves definition o...

This study investigated further the possibility that the tendencies to produce novelty, have curiosity, and desire novelty are three distinct forms of the need for variety. Fantasy (thematic apperception) measures of these tendencies were obtained, along with some variables measured by the structured self-report method, on 87 male subjects. The fan...

Two groups experienced environmental regularity, which consisted of eight presentations of an initially novel series of events." Subgroups then experienced different degrees of change in the order of a final event series. "The results indicated that as the series was repeated (environmental regularity), affective tone [as measured by sentence compl...

Several topics in the area of varied experience and its consequence for the organism are covered in the book's 15 chapters. 3 chapters ("The Forms of Varied Experience," A Conceptual Framework," and "An Appraisal of the Proposed Conceptual Framework") are under the joint authorship of Fiske and Maddi. 2 chapters ("Effects of Monotonous and Restrict...

In a study of latent extinction (the weakening of a learned response without the response itself being performed) found that the higher the drive level during latent extinction the greater is the reduction in secondary reward value as measured by the capacity of cues previously associated with reward to mediate the learning of a new response. The f...