11/7/2025
When:	November 7, 2025 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Where:	Zoom Meeting United States

Join us for an informative session with Dr. George Bonnano, Ph.D.! He will review theory and research evidence on three axioms about resilience. First, as documents in decades of research, response to potentially traumatic events produce various prototypical trajectories of outcome, with the most common being a stable trajectory of healthy functioning, or resilience. Second, resilience is not a matter of a small set of key factors. Rather, paradoxically, the correlates of resilient outcomes show uniformly small effects and say little about who will actually be resilient and who not. Among the reasons for this paradox are that the challenges presented by highly aversive situations are highly variable and that virtually all traits and behaviors have both costs and benefits. Thus, what works in one situation may not work as well, or may even be harmful, in another. How can people solve this paradox and find their way to resilience? The answer to this question, and the third axiom about resilience, is that resilience comes about by virtual of the process of flexible self-regulation or regulatory flexibility. Dr. Bonanno will elaborate on this process and conclude the talk by reviewing recent studies and new directions on regulatory flexibility.