Cultivating Resilience: Insights from Health Psychologist Elizabeth Addington
By Veronica Womack, Associate Director of Inclusive Teaching
Health psychologist Elizabeth Addington, Assistant Professor in the Feinberg School of Medicine's Department of Medical Social Sciences, works to enhance people's ability to manage stress, increase their positive psychosocial experiences, and improve their physical health and quality of life as Associate Director of the Positive Psychology & Health Investigation Group Lab.
Recently, she sat down with the Searle Center's Associate Director of Inclusive Teaching, Veronica Womack, to discuss the power of cultivating positive emotions and self-compassion as well as how individual resilience can enable continued work toward making systemic change.
At the Searle Center, we recognize the importance of building positive relationships and learning environments. This includes faculty-to-student and peer-to-peer relationships. Based on your research, what might instructors do to cultivate or enhance meaningful relationships that will further support one’s resilience?
Drawing from our lab's resilience toolkit of skills for increasing positive emotions and experiences, I'd consider looking out for strengths that you see in students and peers—and be specific. Did someone have a really creative idea or were they resourceful or helpful in a certain situation? Did they crack a good joke or speak up on an important topic in a meeting? Take just a moment first to notice it for yourself. Name it as specifically as you can, and then you can acknowledge it to the person.
It can be really small. Again, I'll emphasize that the point of these things can be really small, but still powerful. It might be just a quick comment or quick message of “Hey, thanks for that moment of humor in the meeting today. I really needed a good laugh.” Or a note in your grading like, "great job connecting these two ideas together. This is really insightful.” Something to really see and acknowledge the other person for the strengths that you're seeing in them.
Our team also builds these skills into short games. Sometimes at the start of our meetings, we might play a game like “Gratitude Popcorn,” where each player names something that they're grateful for and then pops it to the next person to share. When something doesn't go well, we might have a lemons-to-lemonade competition where we try to come up with as many reasons why it's not as bad as it could be or as many silver linings to the situation that we can name. Sharing these kinds of experiences helps to deepen our connections and build resilience in ourselves and for the team as well.
Published Winter 2025