Hardiness

• Control over life

  Commitment - purpose in life

  Challenge - situations as opportunity for growth
• Buffer stress better coping strategies, self care and social support
• less physiological response to stress, less stress-related illness
• Maddi- bell telephone company in stressful period of redundancies and reorganisation. 1/3 had hardy personality suffered fewer stress-related illness
• Male bias
• Effects in different age groups
• Maddi - need all 3 to buffer
• critics of Maddi- Sandvik- 21 navy cadets during stressful field exercises and got hardy score and blood samples- high hardiness, some had low challenge- unbalanced. Those with unbalanced had more potentially damaging reponce to stress
• Sandvik research shows one element of hardiness may be more beneficial than others
• Overlap on Hardiness scale and the measure of neuroticism.
• High neuroticism dwell on failures and focus on negatives, over exaggerate illness. Low hardiness may not be more ill just more neurotic.
• if neuroticism was controlled then the relationship between hardiness and illness is not always seen
• Self report reliant therefore lots of social desirability
• Different measures by different researchers- unreliable