Психологические науки/9. Психология развития

к.п.н. Багаева Ф.И., Макеев И.А., Валиев И.Р.

Санкт-Петербургский государственный политехнический университет, Россия

Resilience as a Stress-Coping Factor within Professional Activity.

In the context of ongoing changes affecting our lives at all levels, the nature of work is also changing in response to these processes. Changes contribute largely to workload and pressure increase, having a disruptive effect on professionals’ performance and emotional well-being. In such a changing context, the success of individuals may reside not only in their professional skills, but also in abilities to cope with new rhythm, tensions and pressures at work, adapt to the new conditions, and work in the atmosphere of trust, cooperation, and support. Jobs in different spheres are being redesigned, and the skills people need today are different from the skills needed in the past. Lecturers work has not escaped the need to change.

Professional stress and collisions are so prevalent in teaching that they have an enormous detrimental effect on the teaching-learning process, manifesting in instructors performing far below their maximum potential, regardless of how well prepared and committed they are. Accumulated stresses can force the most dedicated educator to become emotionally exhausted.

Stress is usually described as an internal response to stimuli or pressures that challenge our ability to adapt or cope, disrupting homeostasis. Stress may be mental, physiological, anatomical or physical. Each type of stress has its own characteristics, symptoms, duration, and treatment approaches. They are: acute stress, episodic acute stress, chronic stress. Excess stress can manifest itself in a variety of emotional, behavioral, and even physical symptoms. And the symptoms of stress vary extremely among different individuals. Among emotional symptoms should be mentioned anxiety, depression, anger, guilt, morbid jealousy, shame/embarrassment and others. Behavioral symptoms – alcohol or drug abuse, avoidance or phobias, Sleep disturbances or insomnia, restlessness, aggression or irritability, poor time management etc. Interpersonal symptoms include: passive or aggressive in relationships, timid or unassertive, loner, no friends, competitive, put other' needs before own, makes friends easily or with difficulty, suspicious or secretive and others.

The subject of the work is individual resistance to stress and stressors. Our main objectives were: to analyze existing research findings concerning resilience and stress-coping abilities; to find out the peculiarities of resilience and its constituents as well as intercorrelation between mentioned constructs; to prove our hypothesis that resilience is a multicomponent construct and that these constituents can be developed and correlate to each other.

The field of stress and coping emerged more than three decades ago from the recognition of the dynamic interaction between person and environment (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984; Moos, 2002). Over the years, researchers developed a system of objectifying and quantifying people’s environment, such as counting the number of major life events or daily hassles that occurred in the past month.

Stress and coping models have placed varying degrees of emphasis on the role of the contextual factors and transactions between person and environment (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984; McCrae, 1984; Pearlin & Schooler, 1978;Wong & Ujimoto, 1998). Moos’ model (1984; 2002) places emphasis on both. It depicts the transactions between the ongoing environmental system and the personal system, and encompasses their joint influences on subsequent transitory conditions, cognitive appraisal and coping skills, and the health and well-being of individuals.

The personal system is composed of individuals’ personal characteristics and resources, such as their cognitive abilities, personality traits, social competence, and self-confidence. Transitory conditions include new acute life events and changes that occur in an individual’s life; individuals appraise these conditions for their degree of threat or challenge and whether they are equipped with adequate personal and environmental resources to deal with the situation.

Many people react to adverse circumstances with a flood of strong emotions and a sense of uncertainty whereas others feel themselves very confident and behave calmly. These people have the ability to distribute their inner powers equally between problems. They deal with their issue’s one by one with no worry. How do people cope with difficult events that change their lives? The answer lies in the construct of resilience. Emmy Warner was one of the earliest scientists to use the term Resilience in the 1970s. The first scientist who published earliest research findings on Resilience was Norman Germezy in 1973.

In short, Resilience means using your own energy to move ahead in the face of adversity [1]. It is also defined as a process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, treats or even significant sources of stress [3]. Likewise, scientists define this concept as an individual's capacity to withstand stressors and not manifest psychology dysfunction, such as mental illness or persistent negative mood which is the mainstream psychological view of resilience.

A person who possesses resilience at a high level can redirect unfavorable changes and conflicts from destructive areas and even uses them for persons’ benefits. They are able to fight influence of stressors at home and work. They are able to sustain resilience even in extremely dangerous situation. A person who possesses low level of resilience is vulnerable in stress situation. They start to feel themselves weak and nervous, they may capitulate in the face of problem and behave themselves as a victim.

Resilience is not an individual trait so it can’t be inherited. Resilience doesn’t fluctuate daily. Not long ago scientists were sure that if you are not resilient today you are not resilient tomorrow. We can build Resilience in ourselves but we must remember that each of us has the personal way of developing it because people don’t react the same to traumatic and stressful life events. An approach to build resilience that works for one person might not work for another.

As for resilience as a phenomenon – we outline three qualities important in our mind for teaching profession as well as treating: reality focus, values, problem solving abilities. The first - a reality focus means having few illusions. It is connected with having a current awareness of the world, acknowledging tough issues. A reality focus prepares people to deal with challenges when they occur. The second quality concerns values. Resilience includes a commitment to higher principles that give meaning to work. The third element is strong problem solving abilities. Resilience includes the capacity to devise innovative solutions to problems that arise in the course of work. It is not a static state and it can be enhanced or learned at least in some measure.

This research was conducted in 2010-2012 aiming at scrutinizing the correlation of resilience constituents. A battery of 3 questionnaires was spread among more than 300 people. The sample of the study comprised three groups: the upper-courses students (future teachers and doctors) and academics from Russian state universities – experienced and young specialists. To analyze the results statistical and correlation methods were used.

The questionnaires were self-administered, complete instructions were provided for the respondents. Because of the sensitive nature of some items, questionnaires were completely anonymous, each being given a code number. Some questionnaires were labeled different to their original names to minimize the reactive effect of participant’s personal beliefs and expectations about some concept.

To test the hypotheses correlation and regression analysis were conducted. Descriptive statistics (means and standards deviation) were calculated. Some results of statistical analysis are represented below. The results will show the difference between the levels of resilience among students and both groups of lecturers, show the level of development of each construct among male and female and people who don’t have working experience and those who have.

	Quiestionnaires	Male	Female	Have Working experience
UCS	140	15%	85%	65%
EL	125	20%	80%	100%
IEL	51	5%	95%	74%

Fig.1.

In the Figure 2. the results shown by teachers and students are displayed. According to the values the results displayed by teachers are lower than those of students. Perhaps it may explained by teachers’ emotional exhaustion. At the same time teachers have stronger system of values (1,2,3) , are more society –oriented , have highly-evolved reality focus abilities, and know how to cope with a lot of hardships in their life whereas students are not ready. The results have shown that the level of emotional competence is higher among teachers but still the level is not normal.

Fig.2.

At the same time lecturers revealed more pessimistic view on certain professional aspects connected with social support either in its emotional or instrumental form.

Fig.3.

With the help of correlation analysis and statistics, we examined the strongest connections between constituents of resilience. After that the correlation pleiades were created which helped to show graphically the connections between constituents. With the help of pleiades we can definitely say that the correlation between reality focus and strong problem-solving abilities is rather strong. The level of resilience can be increased by developing the ability to carry out everything you begin. Faith (in something, not only religion) is very helpful in developing resilience. Careful planning of your activities according to your individual peculiarities and ability to change the plan easily when something goes wrong are the skills that a person should possess to increase resilience. Don’t let the situation influence on your thinking. In conclusion, resilience demands an understanding and knowing of one’s strong and weak sides. But keep in mind that every person have its own way of building resilience, so don’t be afraid of trying each methods represented above.

Positive adaptation to different situations, creative thinking in the context of life situations, believe in yourself and your powers, not allowing your emotions to control your life and behavior and being honest with yourself are all the skills that influence teaching process, working process, career development process etc. are all very powerful methods to build emotional competence[2]. Moreover, the ability to share emotions with friends, to understand emotions by verbal and nonverbal signs, to understand and define emotions accurately and quickly can be of some help in emotional competence development. A person who always believes and hopes for the best, has a high level of emotional competence.

References:

1. Masten S.A, Powell JL, “A resilience framework for research, policy, and practice”, New York, 2003.

2. Cary Cherniss, “Emotional intelligence: What it is and why it matters” New Orleans, 2000

3. Ungar M. ,“A constructionist discourse on resilience: Multiple contexts, multiple realities among at-risk children and youth”, 2004