Kanye Was Right

"Of course, everybody's heard the aphorism, 'Whatever does not kill you makes you stronger,'" says Mark D. Seery of the University at Buffalo. His paper on adversity and resilience appears in the December issue of Current Directions inPsychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. But in psychology, he says, a lot of ideas that seem like common sense aren't supported by scientific evidence.  In one study, Seery and his colleagues found that people who experienced many traumatic life events were more distressed in general -- but they also found that people who had experienced no negative life events had similar problems. The people with the best outcomes were those who had experienced some negative events. Another study found that people with chronic back pain were able to get around better if they had experienced some serious adversity, whereas people with either a lot of adversity or none at all were more impaired.