Hardiness
Hardiness is a personality factor that can protect people from illness despite great stress and critical life events. The individual handling of stressors is in the foreground. The term was introduced in 1979 by Suzanne C. Kobasa.
Components
- Commitment : This means the endeavor of a person to identify himself with everything he does or what he encounters and to get involved in it. Commitment is the opposite of passivity and avoidance behavior and means curiosity about life and a high level of motivation to accomplish something.
- Control : This is the opposite of helplessness. Highly controlled individuals believe they can influence the course of events in their experience. They do not experience events as something strange, overwhelming, because they see that they have various options for reacting and making decisions.
- Challenge (challenge) finally says that changes are not perceived as a threat but as a positive opportunity. Change and change are a part of life for such people, and they see it as an opportunity for new experiences and an incentive for further growth than a threat to their security and stability. Difficulties are taken as an opportunity to learn from them.
criticism
The terminology following, hardiness means a person property, stress situations objectively and edit problem-oriented, while feelings while remaining unnoticed. According to critics, this means insufficient processing of the overall situation. Although freedom of action can be retained in a situation of acute stress (cf. acute stress reaction ), this does not mean that it is necessary to rework previously suppressed feelings.
The underlying concept is also controversial because of its breadth and because of difficulties encountered in measurement.
Attention should be drawn to the conceptual overlaps with constructs of resilience or the sense of coherence with regard to salutogenesis .