Owen Richard Lightsey

What Leads to Wellness? The Role of Psychological Resources in Well-Being

An expanding literature reveals that personality traits and psychological resources (PRs) are important in human well-being. In this article, the author reviews the literature regarding four PRs (positive thoughts, hardiness, generalized self-efficacy, and optimism), discusses the relationships among PRs and between PRs and personality characteristics, and proposes a theory that helps to account for current findings. Specific hypotheses are proposed, and implications for the practice of counseling psychology are discussed.

Impulsivity, Coping, Stress, and Problem Gambling among University Students.

The authors investigated whether coping styles moderated the relationship between (a) impulsivity and stress and (b) stress and gambling behavior and tested whether impulsive persons who use avoidant or emotion-focused coping under high-stress conditions are most likely to gamble. Among 202 university student volunteers, 33% of men but only 3% of women reported problem or pathological gambling, and neither stress, impulsiveness, nor coping predicted gambling among women. Among men, impulsiveness, task coping, and emotion coping accounted for significant and unique variance in gambling. For higher task coping and lower emotion-focused coping, impulsiveness had a weaker relationship to gambling. Additionally, among nonimpulsive men, emotion-focused coping in high stress conditions was most likely to result in gambling.

Resilience, Meaning, and Well-Being

In this issue of The Counseling Psychologist, Smith presents an array of important strength-related literature and offers propositions, stages, and counseling recommendations to foster resilience among youth. This article argues, however, that the strength-based counseling model is not sufficiently operational or clearly distinguishable from other models and that more inclusion of the adult well-being literature could help to clarify key constructs and relationships among variables. The author proffers a focal operationalization of psychological resilience as generalized self-efficacy and discusses the importance of cultural moderators of resilience effects and meaning in life as a predictor of well-being. He recommends studying the incremental therapeutic benefits of strength-focused interventions.

Purpose in life and reasons for living as mediators of the relationship between stress, coping, and suicidal behavior

Positive psychological factors that help protect vulnerable persons from suicidal behavior are vital in understanding resiliency and suicide prevention. The purpose of the current study was to examine whether positive factors (including purpose in life, reasons for living, and coping styles) mediate the relationship between stressful life events and suicidal behaviors among 416 college student volunteers. Reasons for living inversely predicted suicidal behavior and thoughts directly as well as indirectly via an inverse relationship with depression. Purpose in life indirectly predicted suicidal behavior and thoughts via an inverse effect on depression, whereas emotion-focused coping indirectly predicted suicidal behavior and thoughts both through an effect on depression and an inverse effect on reasons for living. In addition, avoidant coping indirectly predicted suicidal behavior via a direct, positive effect on reasons for living. Reasons for living and emotion-oriented coping had the largest effects in the model. Results of this study underscore the importance of augmenting reasons for living and purpose in life among suicidal or potentially suicidal persons.

Racial Identity, Generalized Self-Efficacy, and Self-Esteem: A Pilot Study of a Mediation Model for African American Women.

In this pilot study, the authors tested the hypothesis that a generalized sense of self-efficacy mediates the relationship between racial identity attitudes and self-esteem among African American women. The Racial Identity Attitude Scale, the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, and the Generalized Self-Efficacy Scale were administered in counterbalanced order to 70 African American women volunteers from two local agencies: a church and a private misdemeanor probation institution. Generalized self-efficacy (GSE) mediated the relationship between pre-encounter racial identity attitude and self-esteem. Lower pre-encounter attitude predicted higher GSE, which predicted higher self-esteem. Higher emersion attitudes predicted higher self-esteem and GSE more strongly in the probation subsample. This and other significant differences among the subsamples suggest that racial identity attitudes may play a different role in self-esteem in different groups of African American women.

Positive automatic cognitions as moderators of the negative life event-dysphoria relationship

In this study, the author tested the hypothesis that positive automatic thoughts and the Positive Automatic Thoughts×Negative Life Stress interaction would predict dysphoria. The Automatic Thoughts Questionnaire—Positive, the Automatic Thoughts Questionnaire, the Life Experiences Survey, and the Beck Depression Inventory, were administered to 71 undergraduate volunteers. In hierarchical regression analyses, positive thoughts accounted for unique variance in dysphoria, over and above the variance accounted for by negative life stress and negative thoughts. Furthermore, for higher levels of positive cognitions, negative life stress had a reduced association with dysphoria, which suggested that, as hypothesized, positive cognitions may serve as stress-buffers. Positive automatic cognitions appear to be conceptually viable and may help to account for varied emotional reactions to life stress.In this study, the author tested the hypothesis that positive automatic thoughts and the Positive Automatic Thoughts×Negative Life Stress interaction would predict dysphoria. The Automatic Thoughts Questionnaire—Positive, the Automatic Thoughts Questionnaire, the Life Experiences Survey, and the Beck Depression Inventory, were administered to 71 undergraduate volunteers. In hierarchical regression analyses, positive thoughts accounted for unique variance in dysphoria, over and above the variance accounted for by negative life stress and negative thoughts. Furthermore, for higher levels of positive cognitions, negative life stress had a reduced association with dysphoria, which suggested that, as hypothesized, positive cognitions may serve as stress-buffers. Positive automatic cognitions appear to be conceptually viable and may help to account for varied emotional reactions to life stress.

Generalized Self-Efficacy, Coping, and Self-Esteem as Predictors of Psychological Adjustment Among Children With Disabilities or Chronic Illnesses

This study tested the hypothesis that more use of acceptance coping and less use of avoidance, emotional reaction, and wishful thinking coping would predict higher generalized self-efficacy (GSE) and self-esteem, and that higher GSE and self-esteem would, in turn, predict better psychological adjustment, operationalized as lower anxiety and higher life satisfaction. The alternative hypothesis that GSE and self-esteem would serve as psychological resources that predict coping, and that coping would, in turn, directly predict psychological adjustment, also was tested. Children (n = 42) enrolled at a camp for children with disabilities were administered instruments that assessed coping styles, GSE, self-esteem, anxiety, and life satisfaction. Hierarchical multiple regression and bootstrapping tested the mediational hypotheses. Emotion-oriented coping and self-esteem predicted life satisfaction; distance coping, self-efficacy, and self-esteem predicted anxiety; and self-esteem mediated the relation between self-efficacy and anxiety.

Meaning in Life, Emotion-Oriented Coping, Generalized Self-Efficacy, and Family Cohesion as Predictors of Family Satisfaction among Mothers of Children with Disabilities.

The authors tested whether self-efficacy, coping styles, family cohesion, and meaning in life predicted family satisfaction among 64 mothers of children with disabilities. They also examined whether meaning in life mediated the relationship between cohesion and family satisfaction or served as a resource whose effects on family satisfaction were mediated by coping and cohesion. Stress, meaning in life, emotion-oriented coping, and family cohesion predicted 31% of the variance in family satisfaction. Family cohesion fully mediated the relationships between stress, meaning in life, and emotion-oriented coping on one hand and family satisfaction on the other. Mothers with lower stress exhibited higher meaning; those utilizing less emotion-oriented coping had higher family cohesion. Mothers with higher family cohesion had higher family satisfaction.

Constructive thinking as a mediator of the relationship between extraversion, neuroticism, and subjective well‐being

Mechanisms by which personality affects well‐being are not well understood. Following recommendations to examine intermediate process variables that may help explain the personality–subjective well‐being (SWB) relationship, the authors tested whether constructive thinking (CT) mediated the relationships between both neuroticism and extraversion and SWB components. Measures of each construct were administered to 147 undergraduate volunteers twice over four weeks. In analyses controlling for time 1 SWB and time 2 mood, time 2 CT fully mediated the relationship between time 1 neuroticism and time 2 negative affect and emerged as a strong predictor of negative affect (inversely), positive affect, and happiness. Copyright

Stress Buffers and Dysphoria: A Prospective Study

Following recommendations to include multiple predictors within a single study, this prospective study tested whether generalized self-efficacy (GSE), positive thoughts, optimism, and self-mastery may act as stress buffers. The Generalized Self-Efficacy Scale, the Automatic Thoughts Questionnaire- Positive, the Life Orientation Test, the Self-Mastery Scale, the Automatic Thoughts Questionnaire, the Life Experiences Survey, and the Beck Depression Inventory were administered to 69 undergraduate volunteers twice over 5 weeks. The GSE x negative life events interaction accounted for unique variance in future dysphoria, indicating that, for greater preexisting GSE, negative life events were less associated with dysphoria. This finding suggests that GSE may act as a stress buffer: When exposed to stressors, persons with higher GSE may become less dysphoric than persons with lower GSE. Additionally, for higher self-mastery, negative life events had a stronger relationship with future dysphoria. This suggests that self-mastery may in some circumstances act as a stress exacerbator: When exposed to stressors, persons with higher self-mastery appear to become more dysphoric than persons with lower self-mastery.