INTRODUCTION Although, we may wish otherwise, disasters do happen. In any given year, human beings can be subject to severe flooding, devastating hurricanes, war, and, especially in recent years, the threat and sometimes horror of a large-scale terrorist attack. When imagining what the dread victims must face after unexpected and catastrophic events, people often assume that they will suffer
... [Show full abstract] lasting emotional damage. However, this is usually not the case. Research on potentially traumatic events (PTEs) has consistently revealed a wide range of reactions; apart from a limited subset of people who suffer extreme distress, most people cope with such events extremely well (Bonanno, 2004, 2005). In this chapter, we use the phrase “potentially traumatic” to underscore that there are measurable and important individual differences in how people respond to such events (Bonanno, 2005). Simply put, highly aversive events that fall outside the range of normal experience are “potentially” traumatic because not everyone experiences them as traumatic. We begin by briefly reviewing the historical background on the construct of psychological trauma, and then consider recent empirical studies on individual differences in response to PTEs. We consider common outcomes people exhibit after exposure to PTEs, including both chronic and pathological reactions as well as relatively healthy reactions. We focus, in particular, on the growing evidence for the human capacity to thrive even after the most difficult of experiences and on the emergent concept of psychological resilience.