Trauma and Loss: Empirical Perspectives

Catalog description

This course examines the impact on adaptive functioning of potential traumatic events, such as bereavement, traumatic injury, life-threatening illness, military deployment, mass trauma, and disaster. We will address the role of coping strategies, positive aspects of psychological functioning, such as smiling and laughter, prior adversity and trauma exposure, psychobiological and genetics factors, whether people can actually benefit from significant adversity, the way culture shapes our capacity to cope with stress and with loss. Throughout, we will emphasize that human beings are resilient to trauma and loss, and that resilience’s emerges from a normative adaptational systems and an array of person-centered and social-contextual factors.