In recent years, hardiness has emerged from both retrospective and prospective research as a promising resource for preserving wellness (e.g., Funk, 1992; Maddi, 1989, 1998; Maddi & Kobasa, 1984; Ouellette, 1993). Conceptually, hardiness involves the interrelated self-perceptions of commitment, control, and challenge that help in managing stressful circumstances in a manner that turns them into developmental rather than debilitating experiences (Maddi & Kobasa, 1984). Persons strong in commitment rely on themselves to find ways of turning whatever they are experiencing into something that seems interesting and important to them, getting involved rather than feeling alienated. Persons strong in control believe that, through effort, they can more often than not influence the course of events around them rather than passively seeing themselves as victims of circumstance. Finally, people strong in challenge believe that fulfillment is to be found in continual growth in wisdom through what is learned from experience rather than in easy comfort, security, and routine. Although research has shown commitment, control, and challenge to be interrelated, they are far from the same concept (e.g., Bartone, 1989). Together, they constitute courage and resiliency in facing life's tasks.
Construct validational evidence indicates that hardiness is (a) a negative predictor of self-reported illness levels in a variety of samples (e.g., Florian, Milkulincer, & Taubman, 1995; Kobasa, Maddi, & Kahn, 1982; Kuo & Tsai, 1986; Ouellette, 1993; Weibe, 1991), (b) a negative predictor of burnout among nurses (e.g., Keane, Ducette, & Adler, 1985; McCranie, Lambert, & Lambert, 1987; Rich & Rich, 1987; Topf, 1989), (c) a positive predictor of activity level in the elderly (e.g., Magnani, 1990), (d) a positive predictor of quality of life in serious illness sufferers (e.g., Pollock, 1989; Pollock, Christian, & Sands, 1990; Pollock & Duffy, 1990), and (e) a positive predictor of performance effectiveness (e.g., Maddi & Hess, 1992; Westman, 1990). In one study (Kobasa, Maddi, Puccetti, & Zola, 1985), hardiness emerged as a more powerful buffer against illness than physical exercise or social support. Evidence is also accumulating to ease concerns that the negative relationship between hardiness and self-reported illness may be due to the confounding effect of a negative affectivity bias. Specifically, there are now at least two demonstrations (Florian et al., 1995; Maddi & Khoshaba, 1994) of the persistence of the negative relationship between hardiness and various self-reports of illness when negative affectivity is statistically controlled. Furthermore, there is now evidence (Ouellette, 1993) that hardiness negatively predicts illness measured objectively.
Research has also identified mechanisms whereby hardiness may preserve health and enhance performance. Relevant findings include the tendency of hardiness to (a) promote the view of life changes as less stressful (e.g., Allred & Smith, 1989, Rhodewalt & Zone, 1989), (b) elicit more effective coping efforts (e.g., Maddi, 1996), (c) produce a more vigorous immune response (e.g., Okun, Zantra, & Robinson, 1988) and (d) result in increased conscientiousness in terms of sound health practices (e.g., Weibe & McCallum, 1986).
To facilitate the practical application of hardiness, Maddi (1987) developed and preliminarily tested a relevant training program. The present study attempted a further empirical evaluation of the effectiveness of this training program. Hardiness training engages cognition, emotion, and action in coping effectively with stressful circumstances and uses the feedback from this process to deepen commitment and control and challenge beliefs about oneself in the world (Maddi, 1987). The conceptual model (Maddi, 1987; Maddi & Kobasa, 1984) that guided development of this training program assumes that if life circumstances are appraised as stressful, an arousal (or strain) reaction will result. As the number of life events appraised as stressful increases per unit of time, the strain reaction may become pronounced and prolonged enough to produce wellness breakdown in the form of illness (physical or mental) or behavioral ineffectiveness. Among the signs of behavioral ineffectiveness are a decreased sense of social support and diminished job satisfaction.
In decreasing the likelihood of wellness breakdown, health practices (e.g., physical exercise, relaxation/meditation, and sound nutrition) are somewhat helpful through decreasing strain reactions, but they do not generally decrease the stressfulness of the circumstances that caused these reactions. To decrease the appraised stressfulness of circumstances, it is important that there be transformational coping processes aimed at understanding the circumstances more fully, putting them in a broader perspective, and taking decisive actions to change them so as to decrease their stressfulness. This transformational coping is hard work, partly because there are skills involved but mainly because one must be motivated to approach the stressful circumstance (by interacting with it in thought and action) rather than avoid it. Hardiness may constitute the motivation in that, if one is characterized by commitment, control, and challenge, one is more inclined to deal with rather than avoid life circumstances that appear stressful.
With this model in mind, the first aim of hardiness training is to teach trainees the skills of transformational coping whereby one can decrease the stressfulness of circumstances through cognitively and emotionally exploring one's appraisals of them so as to reach broader perspective and deeper understanding and using the information gained in this way to develop and carry out decisive, problem-solving action plans. The second aim of hardiness training is to use the feedback obtained through the first aim to deepen the motivational self-perceptions of commitment, control, and challenge. By the time hardiness training has been completed, trainees should have learned the skills of transformational coping and should have the motivation to use them.
Using a waiting list control, Maddi (1987) showed that hardiness training simultaneously increased personality hardiness and decreased subjective (e.g., anxiety and depression) and objective (blood pressure) signs of strain. This pattern of results persisted over the 6-month follow-up period used. Although this study suggests some sort of effectiveness for hardiness training, its design did not permit much refinement of understanding.
Consequently, the present study compared hardiness training with two other conditions: relaxation/meditation and passive listening. The relaxation/meditation condition was of the sort commonly used in stress management. According to the hardiness model (Maddi, 1989), relaxation/meditation training should be of some benefit, but, since it tends to decrease strain without addressing its causes in stressful events, its effects should be less than those of hardiness training. The passive listening condition was devised to serve as a placebo and social support control. In it, the trainer was restricted to bringing the group together and facilitating its members' discussion of stresses.
Method
Overview
This experiment used three trainers and three treatment conditions. Training took place in small groups of 6 trainees with one trainer. Over the course of the study, each of the three trainers employed all of the treatment conditions, such that there were three groups per treatment. A battery of questionnaires was administered at pretest (no more than 1 week before training began) and again at posttest (no more than 1 week after training ended).
The trainer expert in hardiness training taught this treatment condition to the other two trainers, and the trainer expert in relaxation/meditation taught this treatment condition to the other two trainers. Each of these expert trainers had a minimum of 2 years of experience with the treatment of their expertise. The third trainer was not initially expert in either treatment condition but had more than 2 years of clinical experience. The process of training for this experiment involved written manuals, tape recordings, and the amount of supervised experience with pilot participants deemed necessary for mastery.
All treatment conditions involved ten 1.5-hr sessions, each separated by 1 week. Groups always met in the same room in the company's medical department. Each group met during regularly established hours planned to accommodate participants' stated schedules.
Participants
All participants were managers in a utilities company. With the company's endorsement, an item was placed in its newsletter announcing stress management courses available to managers on a voluntary basis. After a 3-week response period, 54 of the pool of 64 volunteers were assigned at random to nine groups with the restriction that groups be balanced as to management level and gender. Three groups were then assigned at random to each treatment condition such that each trainer was involved with one group in each treatment condition.
Participants were notified of their group's meeting time and place, although there was no communication of the three different treatment conditions. Instead, all participants were told that they would learn an effective procedure for stress management. The pretest questionnaire was sent to participants with instructions to complete it and hand it in at the 1st session. At the 10th session, the posttest questionnaire was distributed for completion and mail-in during the next week. Whenever posttest questionnaires were not received within a week, the trainer called the participant as a reminder.
Some participant attrition occurred both during the period between volunteering and the beginning of training and during training itself. The two stated reasons for dropping out were job transfer and increased job pressure. Through participant replacement (using the 10 hold-back volunteers) before training began, an attempt was made to ensure group sizes of no smaller than 6. Because no participant replacement was possible once training had begun, groups varied in size by the time training had been completed. Also, 4 participants were removed from analysis because of incomplete data. The final sample included 18, 12, and 16 participants in the hardiness, meditation/relaxation, and passive listening conditions, respectively. In all three conditions, the gender ratio was about 60% men and 40% women, and the management-level ratio was about 50% lower level and 50% middle and upper level.
Training Conditions
The hardiness training condition involved four parts. In the introductory part (two sessions), participants described their current stressful circumstances, and the trainer presented a model that highlighted coping and clarified the purpose of the various class sessions. In the next four sessions, participants practiced the three techniques for transformational coping. In terms of these techniques, situational reconstruction (Maddi, 1987) stretches the imagination to facilitate a broader perspective on and deepened understanding of the stressor, focusing (Gendlin, 1978) involves exploring bodily sensations for personal and emotionally based insights, and compensatory self-improvement (Maddi, 1987) aids one in accepting unchangeable situations without becoming bitter or falling into self-pity. The following three sessions involved participants in carrying out action plans developed in class for decisively changing stressful circumstances. Resulting feedback was used to deepen self-perceptions of commitment, control, and challenge. Finally, the last session pointed participants toward the future and encouraged them to continue using the approach as stressful circumstances occurred. All sessions but the first included relevant homework assignments.
The relaxation/meditation training condition also had four parts. In the introductory part (two sessions), participants related their stressful circumstances, and the trainer presented a model highlighting relaxation/meditation and clarified the purpose of the various class sessions. In the next part (five sessions), participants learned autogenic exercises and other techniques for muscle relaxation, followed by visualization and imaging techniques. In the next part (two sessions), they practiced non-religiously based meditation. The approach was similar to that used by Benson (1976). In the final part (one session), participants pointed toward the future and how they would use the techniques in decreasing stress. After all but the first session, participants were given homework assignments to practice further what had been demonstrated in class, and they handed in accounts of what had transpired.
The passive listening condition had three parts. In the introductory part (two sessions), participants related their stressful circumstances, and the trainer presented a model highlighting the importance of finding one's own solutions to stress through reflection and discussion with peers. Participants were encouraged to believe that the effectiveness of this approach has been demonstrated. In the next part (seven sessions), trainers restricted their involvement to bringing the class together so that its members could discuss their stresses among themselves in a supportive setting. In the final part (one session), participants anticipated future stresses and how they would deal with them (once again, without guidance from the trainer). After all sessions but the first, homework assignments involved participants writing down and handing in accounts of what they had learned and were trying to implement. This condition served as a placebo control (in that a convincing rationale was presented that the class would have beneficial stress management effects) and a social support control (in that participants discussed stressful circumstances among themselves in a supportive environment).
As a means of ensuring that the three treatment conditions were indeed experientially different, two psychology graduate students who were familiar with the specifics of these approaches to training but were unaware of the present hypotheses judged samples of audiotaped sessions. Specifically, they were given tape recordings of the third, sixth, and ninth sessions of all classes without identification, and they listened as long as necessary to reach certainty as to which treatment condition they were observing. Both judges were more than 90% accurate. An attempt was also made to determine how well participants learned what was being taught in each of the training conditions. Involvement was evidenced by the 83%, 85%, and 81% mean homework-submission rates of the hardiness, relaxation/meditation, and passive listening conditions, respectively. In terms of grasp of the approach, the content of each participant's homework assignments was judged by the same two graduate students (after their earlier-described task). On a 3-point scale ranging from failure to grasp (0) to complete grasp (2), the interscorer agreement across the sample was adequate (r = .77). The mean levels of 1.57, 1.73, and 1.61 for the hardiness, relaxation/meditation, and passive listening conditions, respectively, did not differ significantly. It would appear that the training conditions were similarly effective in involving participants and teaching them an approach to stress management.
Measures
The same composite questionnaire was used at pretest and posttest. It included measures of personality hardiness, job satisfaction, subjectively experienced strain, perceived social support, and illness.
The Personal Views Survey (Bartone, 1989; Maddi, 1987) was used to measure hardiness. This test consists of 45 rating scale items worded to refer to beliefs about oneself or the world that concern sense of commitment, control, or challenge. On each scale, some items are positive and others are negative indicators. These 45 items survived factor analyses (Bartone, 1989; Maddi, 1987), which yielded, as expected, three inter-correlated factors easily identifiable as commitment, control, and challenge. Each surviving item loaded more highly on its factor than on the other two. Internal consistency (alpha) coefficients with working adults have been estimated at .76, .83, .79, and .90 for commitment, control, challenge, and total hardiness, respectively (Bartone, 1989; Maddi, 1987). Examples of hardiness items are as follows: “It's exciting for me to learn something about myself” and “Most of life gets wasted doing things that don't mean anything” (commitment); “When I make plans, I'm certain I can make them work” and “I find it's usually very hard to change a friend's mind about something” (control); and “It bothers me when something unexpected interrupts my daily routine” and “I enjoy being with people who are unpredictable” (challenge).
The measure of job satisfaction (Maddi, 1987) consisted of items covering task, interpersonal, supervisory, and policy characteristics. Adequate reliability and validity have been demonstrated for this scale.
For subjectively experienced strain, the total score on the Hopkins Symptom Checklist (Derogatis, Lipman, Rickels, Uhlenhuth, & Covi, 1974) was used. Consisting of 58 items, this test has adequate reliability and is in common use to indicate levels of anxiety, depression, somatization, and interpersonal sensitivity. The total score may be taken as a general indication of sympathetic arousal or strain, as shown by such sample items as “heart pounding or racing” and “a lump in your throat.”
Participants also completed a form of the Seriousness of Illness Survey (Wyler, Masuda, & Holmes, 1968) validated against physicians' diagnoses (Kobasa, Maddi, & Courington, 1981). This test includes common illnesses that vary in severity (e.g., influenza vs. heart attack), only a small proportion of which are likely to be self-diagnosed (e.g., influenza). For convenience, the pretraining and posttraining reporting period used was the length of the course (2.5 months).
Perceived social support was measured as the total of four scales devised by Moos (1979). Two of these scales concerned the work site, and the other two concerned the home. Adequate reliability and validity have been demonstrated for these scales.
Results
As indicated earlier, the number of participants involved in the study dwindled, through attrition and incomplete questionnaire responses, to 18, 12, and 16 in the hardiness training, relaxation/meditation, and passive listening conditions, respectively. Although participants were assigned to treatment conditions at random, pretreatment scores on the dependent variables of this study showed some variation across conditions (see Tables 1 through 5). These pretreatment differences, although reaching significance only in the case of hardiness scores, F(2) = 4.05, p < .01, probably reflect the modest number of participants available for assignment to conditions. Because of this initial variation, the means of pretreatment and posttreatment difference scores within subjects were used throughout in analyses of treatment effects.
Tables 1 through 5 show the pretreatment and posttreatment raw and differenced means associated with each of the three treatment conditions on a particular dependent variable. Throughout, the means of participants' pretreatment and posttreatment scores were subjected to one-way analyses of variance supplemented by t tests.
Table 1
summarizes treatment effects on personality hardiness scores. As indicated by analysis of variance, the treatment conditions appear to have affected hardiness scores differentially, F(2) = 4.00, p < .01. As expected, hardiness training increased hardiness level more than did relaxation/meditation, t(29) = 1.82, p < .0001, or passive listening, t(33) = 10.28, p < .0001. This was the case even though relaxation/meditation was definitely effective in increasing hardiness in comparison with passive listening, t(27) = 9.19, p < .0001.
Table 2
summarizes the results with regard to self-reported strain (total score on the Hopkins Symptoms Checklist). The pattern of results is similar. The training conditions appear to have had differential effects, F(2) = 3.48, p < .03. Hardiness training was more effective in reducing strain than were either relaxation/meditation, t(29) = 3.05, p < .04, or passive listening, t(33) = 3.30, p < .007, conditions. Finally, relaxation/meditation was more effective in reducing strain than was passive listening, t(27) = 3.33, p < .0001.
The effects of the training conditions on self-reported illness scores are summarized in Table 3.
Once again, the pattern was similar. There were differential effects attributable to conditions, F(2) = 11.19, p < .03. Hardiness training was more effective in reducing illness symptoms than either relaxation/meditation, t(29) = 3.91, p < .004, or passive listening, t(33) = 4.22, p < .003. There appeared to be no difference in the effectiveness of relaxation/meditation and passive listening, t(27) = 0.63, p = .53. Inspection understandably revealed that the decreased illness scores in the hardiness training group were due to the more transitory symptoms measured (e.g., influenza, headaches, back pain, and fatigue) rather than the persisting illnesses (e.g., heart disease, phlebitis, and gout).
Table 4
shows the results concerning job satisfaction. Once again, the training conditions appeared to have differential effects, F(2) = 1.89, p < .04. Hardiness training was associated with a larger increase than either relaxation/meditation, t(29) = 8.22, p < .001, or passive listening, t(33) = 7.52, p < .001. Also, passive listening produced a greater increase in job satisfaction than did relaxation/meditation, t(27) = 6.31, p < .001.
The results for self-reported social support are summarized in Table 5.
Differential effects again resulted from the training conditions, F(2) = 35.05, p < .04. Hardiness training produced an increase in self-reported social support by comparison with both relaxation/meditation, t(29) = 8.48, p < .001, and passive listening, t(33) = 9.22, p < .001. Also, passive listening produced a greater increase in social support than relaxation/meditation, t(27) = 7.65, p < .001.
Discussion
As expected, hardiness training appears to have had a more beneficial effect than either relaxation/meditation or passive listening conditions. Participants experiencing hardiness training showed greater increases in personality hardiness, job satisfaction, and perceived social support levels, coupled with greater decreases in subjective strain and illness severity, than did those experiencing relaxation/meditation or passive listening. It would appear that, as hardiness training enables people to make commitments, exercise control, and grow through the challenge of interaction with the world, they begin to experience their work and home lives as more meaningful and rewarding. In this process, they feel less tense and experience fewer signs of illness.
That relaxation/meditation training has some of these same effects to a more modest degree than hardiness training is understandable. After all, people who start out feeling stressed and tense and have this discomfort eased through relaxation/meditation training are not unlikely to take a more optimistic outlook on the job and at home and to see themselves as stronger and more capable. But they may have learned little if anything about how to transform the stressful events to advantage, so their relief may tend to be temporary and only moderate. They may still tend to respond with strain to the next stressful event and will perhaps have learned only how to moderate that strain once it has occurred, not how to avoid it in the first place.
Although the first demonstration of the effectiveness of hardiness training (Maddi, 1987) suffered from reliance on a waiting list control, the present study has gone further by comparing hardiness training with a commonly used stress management approach and a placebo/social support control. Furthermore, it appears that hardiness training can be learned, and used effectively, by a range of trainers. At this point, hardiness training can be taken seriously as a tool for stress management. It would be useful in further research to determine the essential features that make hardiness training effective. In particular, research might evaluate the relative importance of transformational coping training as opposed to the aspects of this approach that deepen hardiness beliefs. In addition, further research might explore the value of hardiness training in people with specific problems (e.g., marital difficulties or substance abuse) rather than more general life stressfulness.
Acknowledgements
Corresponding Author
All authors were part of Salvatore R. Maddi's original research team that developed the hardiness concept and approach. Salvatore R. Maddi received his PhD from Harvard and has since taught stress management, health psychology, personality psychology, and clinical psychology, first at the University of Chicago and now at the University of California, Irvine. The recipient of many honors and founder of the Hardiness Institute, Maddi has supplemented his academic work with a leadership role in industrial/organizational consulting, clinical practice, and forensic witnessing.
Stephen Kahn received his PhD from the University of Chicago and has since then combined a clinical psychology practice in Chicago with ad hoc teaching at various colleges and consulting work.
Salvatore R. Maddi's daughter, Karen L. Maddi received her PhD from the University of North Carolina and is currently a member of the counseling staff at the University of Illinois, Chicago. In addition, she maintains a clinical psychology practice and does outreach teaching and workshop in the Chicago area.
All three authors still use the hardiness approach.This research was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grant MH 28839.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Salvatore R. Maddi, University of California, 3340 Social Ecology II, Irvine, California 92697-7085
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