Psychology Professor Anthony Mancini, PhD, Leads the Way in Resilience Research

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Anthony Mancini, PhD

Pace University Associate Professor of Psychology Anthony Mancini, PhD, has become a leading voice in research on trauma and resilience, sharing his insights on NPR’s Hidden Brain 2.0 podcast and in Forbes.

Some of your recent research has centered on the connections between trauma and resilience. Can you briefly describe what you’ve studied and your findings?

My early career focused on the different ways people respond to traumatic and acutely stressful events. I did this work with George Bonanno (Columbia University), and we pioneered—if that is not too grandiose a claim—the application of some newer statistical methods to the study of trauma. Essentially, these methods allowed us to separate people into different trajectories of distress after a traumatic event. At the time, no one had used these statistical approaches specifically for trauma, but there are now probably thousands of papers that use them on traumatic events.

In every study we found that most people, about 60–80 percent, showed a resilient response pattern of stable adaptive functioning. This didn’t mean they weren’t affected. It just meant they were able to go about their lives as before, going to work, taking care of children/family, seeing friends, etc. However, we also found that some people struggled to a greater extent before gradually returning to normative functioning, and a smaller subset showed persistent difficulties that likely reflected, for example, posttraumatic stress disorder.

To be clear, we found a high proportion of resilient people in every sample and every event we studied, from bereavement, military deployment, a school shooting, traumatic injury, life-threatening illness, divorce, 9/11, and COVID, among other events.

You also received a grant to study the psychological impacts of COVID-19. How was this grant meaningful to you, and what were the findings of your study?

This grant emerged directly from my research on resilience and individual differences. One unexpected result from this research—which emerged in a few studies—was a pattern of improved functioning from before to after the trauma. This was particularly apparent on the study I did on the Virgina Tech campus shootings, at the time the worst mass shooting in US history. Because this study measured people before the shootings (because of an unrelated study), we could compare how they were doing before and after. Surprisingly, about 15 percent of participants showed dramatic improvements in their functioning after the shootings, and this improvement was linked with an improved social environment (greater perceived support from others and social resources).

This finding alerted me to the key element of the social environment in the stress response, and I developed a theory to account for it—“psychosocial gains from adversity.” This theory argues that traumatic events can improve functioning when they have corresponding effects on the social environment or people’s willingness to engage with and affiliate with others.

The purpose of the COVID-19 grant is to test some hypotheses from psychosocial gains from adversity. The study looks at a broad feature of the environment—social capital—and examines whether it influences the way people coped with the challenges imposed by COVID, particularly the economic difficulties many people faced. In a way, the study zooms out to look at the geography of social capital and zooms in to look at individual adaptation simultaneously. This involved a rather complicated data collection scheme involving 1,600 participants from specific regions of the country, and we are now collecting the data. So I can’t yet tell what we found, but we will have a sense of that in the next year. Stay tuned!

How do you hope your research will make an impact?

I think of this in two ways. First, I hope my research will remind people that human beings are far more resilient than we seem to assume. Second, I hope it will alert us especially to the crucial nature of our social world, the surrounding environment of friends and family but also so-called “loose ties,” neighbors, baristas, shopkeepers, etc., who provide a sense of general reassurance and help us to manage our own experiences. A potent intervention on psychological functioning may, in fact, be quite difficult to implement and thus to detect—because it involves our surrounding environment and networks of people we interact with. Our capacity to trust and cooperate with others has important effects on our psychology, and these are also not sufficiently credited, especially in this time of polarization and divisiveness.

In class, I sometimes use the analogy of trying to merge into a crowded highway. If someone allows you in, you will be more likely to do the same for someone else. By contrast, if no one allows you to merge, you will be more likely not to cooperate with someone else. These effects cascade across people from person to person to person, and I think this dimension of human psychology, the degree to which we are embedded in cooperative and mutual relations, influence our capacity to live happy, productive lives. I’d hope my research might help to beam a light on the importance of the broader social realm for adaptive functioning.

How are students involved in your research?

Students are involved to a considerable degree. I run a lab, the Trauma, Social Processes, and Resilience Lab, which includes undergraduates, masters-level, and doctoral students. In the lab, I try to give them a sense of how an active researcher works, and I expose them to basic skills in research, such as literature reviews, data management, data analysis, and write-up. Virtually every year we produce a poster for a national conference, and students also often have the chance to work on a manuscript for publication. Several students were recently co-authors on a manuscript published early this year, and I have another one that is currently in revision and expect to be published.

How does your research inform your teaching?

Research is fundamental to my teaching because it trained me to think in a rigorous and open-minded way. Science is devoted to the discovery of truth, but truth is elusive and demands both a clear understanding of cause, as well as a willingness to update your beliefs continuously. My teaching emphasizes that we pay attention to what the data are telling us, as opposed to what we might like to be true, and I provide concrete instruction in how to understand causal effects in the real world. I also emphasize the necessity to be flexible in your views, to allow them to change in response to updated findings. I illustrate these points with examples of my own views that were updated in response to new research.

How have Pace and the psychology department supported your research?

My psychology department has encouraged my research and helped me to carve out a space for it. I very much feel free to follow my instincts and explore what interests me. Dare I say too that I sense genuine pride in my research accomplishments from my colleagues. All of this has helped me to continue to pursue new ideas.

Do you have any new or upcoming research projects on the horizon?

Yes, in addition to the grant study I’m working on, I’ve become very interested in causal inference, and am right now using a variety of new techniques to understand the causal effects of bereavement and a hurricane.

I’m finding that bereavement tends to increase social behavior, and when it does, it actually reduces depression from pre-loss. I’m also finding that flooding from a hurricane has a causal effect on increased perceptions of support, as well as causal effect on an increased likelihood of prosocial volunteering with clean up.

Beyond that, I hope to better understand the ways stress can increase social interaction and benefit functioning—the circumstances that contribute to reaching out to others and the ones that might inhibit a social response to stress.