Oct 16, 2010 10:46 GMT  ·  By

A new study carried out by Mark Seery, PhD – assistant professor of psychology at the University at Buffalo, E. Alison Holman, PhD – assistant professor of nursing sciences, University of California, Irvine and Roxane Cohen Silver, PhD – professor of psychology and social behavior and medicine at UC Irvine, concluded that people who have had some adverse events in their lives were more satisfied, had lower global distress, lower functional impairment and PTS symptoms.

Their research provided scientific support for Nietzsche's saying that what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.

This study was a multi-year longitudinal research of the effects that adverse life events have on mental health, and it actually concluded that they determine people to adapt better and be more resilient, which improves their mental health and well being.

The researchers focused on a national sample of 2,398 people, who reported their life story of difficult experiences and whose current mental health and well being was assessed.

Seery, senior author of the study, and co-researchers concluded that among these subjects who had been assessed repeatedly from 2001 to 2004, those who underwent some adverse events had better mental health and well-being outcomes than those with a high history of adversity or no history at all.

He said that they “tested for quadratic relationships between lifetime adversity and a variety of longitudinal measures of mental health and well-being, including global distress, functional impairment, post-traumatic stress symptoms and life satisfaction.

“Consistent with prior research on the impact of adversity, linear effects emerged in our results, such that more lifetime adversity was associated with higher global distress, functional impairment and PTS symptoms, as well as lower life satisfaction.

“However, our results also yielded quadratic, U-shaped patterns, demonstrating a critical qualification to the seemingly simple relationship between lifetime adversity and outcomes.

“Our findings revealed that a history of some lifetime adversity -- relative to both no adversity or high adversity -- predicted lower global distress, lower functional impairment, lower PTS symptoms and higher life satisfaction.”

Seery added that moderate lifetime adversity contributes to developing people's resilience.

“Although we studied major lifetime adversity, there is reason to believe that other relatively mundane experiences should also contribute to resilience,” he adds.

“This suggests that carefully designed psychotherapeutic interventions may be able to do so, as well, although there is much work that still needs to be done to fully understand resilience and where it comes from.”

The study is entitled “Whatever Does Not Kill Us: Cumulative Lifetime Adversity, Vulnerability and Resilience,” and will be published in the next issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.