Norman Garmezy, a developmental psychologist at the University of Minnesota, met thousands of children in his four decades of research. A nine-year-old boy in particular stuck with him. He has an alcoholic mother and an absent father. But each day he would walk in to school with a smile on his face. He wanted to make sure that "no one would feel pity for him and no one would know his mother's incompetence." The boy exhibited a quality Garmezy identified as "resilience."

Resilience presents a challenge for psychologists. People who are lucky enough to never experience any sort of adversity(逆境) won't know how resilient they are. It's only when they're faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, comes out. Some give in and some conquer.

Garmezy's work opened the door to the study of the elements that could enable an individual's success despite the challenges they faced. His research indicated that some elements had to do with luck, but quite large set of elements was psychological, and had to do with how the children responded to the environment. The resilient children had what psychologists call an "internal locus of control (内控点)." They believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements. The resilient children saw themselves as the arrangers of their own fates.

George Bonanno has been studying resilience for years at Columbia University's Teachers College. He found that some people are far better than others at dealing with adversity. This difference might come from perception(认知) whether they think of an event as traumatic(创伤), or as an opportunity to learn and grow. "Stressful" or "traumatic" events themselves don't have much predictive power when it comes to life outcomes. "Exposure to potentially traumatic events does not predict later functioning," Bonanno said. "It's only predictive if there's a negative response." In other words, living through adversity doesn't guarantee that you'll suffer going forward.

The good news is that positive perception can be taught. "We can make ourselves more or less easily hurt by how we think about things," Bonanno said. In research at Columbia, the neuroscientist Kevin Ochsner has shown that teaching people to think of adversity in different ways—to reframe it in positive terms when the initial response is negative, or in a less emotional way when the initial response is emotionally "hot"—changes how they experience and react to the adversity.