Congratulations, Emilee, on being awarded “Thesis with Distinction” from the Honors College and given a “Thesis Award in Psychology (certificate and sash)” in recognition of her considerable and exceptional accomplishment!!
Emilee Causey presented her Honors College senior thesis that was later presented at Oakland University’s Honors College Research Day and is titled Is Resilience Hiding a Dark Side? An Exploration of Resilience and Unrealistic Optimism.
Her research objective was to further examine the relationship between unrealistic optimism and resilience along with the extent to which resilience may affect an individual’s judgment of event likelihood. It was hypothesized that individuals who are highly resilient will report a lower likelihood of themselves
experience the same events, and less likely to alter their answers after being given fabricated rates framed as the true prevalence. Events would include being struck by lightning, failing a course, and so on. A sample of 118 college undergraduate students was recruited through introductory psychology courses and completed an in-person survey that included Brief Resilience Scale and Event Likelihood. Research participation gave credit compensation for various courses. Emilee performed a correlational analysis and linear regression analysis.
Hypotheses one and two were not supported by correlational analysis and linear analysis. Highly resilient individuals did not report a lower likelihood of negative events happening to themselves. They also did not rate others as being more likely to experience the same negative events. On the other hand, hypothesis three was partially supported. Highly resilient individuals were less likely to change their answers for certain events but not others. Three of the negative events lacked significance, which suggests the relationship between an individual’s estimations and their resilience level differ based on the event.
Despite the lack of the significant results, there was a prevalent trend of negative associations between resilience and event likelihood, which can be attributed to the correlation between self-esteem and social competence to resilience. Higher levels of social competence tend to correlate with frequent engagement in risky behaviors. Self-awareness can also influence the resilience of the individual; therefore, participants with higher resilience may have a strong sense of self and recognize their abilities. After participants heard the actual statistics, they did not change their answers which suggests highly resilient individuals may less cautious. This could be a result of high levels of optimism in resilient individuals that indicates a potential “dark side” to resilience. High levels of optimism could result in positively viewing the future leading to failure to recognize the possible bad experiences.
Future research could investigate the implications of negative psychological effects and more events related to impulsivity and risk-taking. Researchers could continue to investigate other specific factors of resilience that lead may lead to negative effects along with other negative sides to resilience in addition to risk-taking, inaccurate estimations, and psychological stress effects.
One more thing — Congratulations on your graduation, Emilee! We are so happy to share in the excitement and joy of your graduation, and very proud of you!! We appreciate all your contributions to the FF- PTG Lab and continue to support you as you continue to further your education. We wish you all the best in your new career for Master’s in Counseling program at Wayne State! We hope you swing by Pryale!
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