On Thursday, April 11, Masten presented her ideas to a full auditorium at the University of Louisville, which included psychology students as well as visiting high school students.

Resilience science began around 1970 as a search to explain how some children who face severe adversity seem to thrive while others do not. In recent years, resilience research has transformed practice in clinical psychology, pediatrics, psychiatry, school psychology, counseling, social work, family social science and disaster response.

“As I studied children and families dealing with war, disasters, poverty, violence and homelessness, I found a consistent set of surprisingly ordinary but powerful factors at work,” she said. “Resilience didn’t depend on special qualities but on a capacity to adapt that we develop over time as we are nurtured, learn and gain experience.”

Masten’s current resilience research, along with others in her field, shifts the focus to positive outcomes, strength-based, promotive and protective processes, and building capacity at multiple levels: within individuals, in religions and other cultural systems and in community and society systems.

According to Masten, a “short list” of psychosocial factors that play a part in nurturing resilience in children include ones you might expect to see such as effective parenting and safe, effective schools and communities, but also things like purpose, sense of meaning, hope, faith and optimism, positive routines, rituals and cultural traditions, and positive view of self, identity and capabilities.

Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACES, has become a buzzword in modern social science and child development studies, and includes experiences such as physical abuse, emotional abuse, low education or parental incarceration. Masten spoke about the importance of also examining and measuring positive childhood experiences, (PCEs), such as having at least one caregiver with whom you felt safe, beliefs that gave you comfort, and at least one teacher that cared about you.

Resilience is not something that just lives in the individual, said Masten, but is embedded and interconnected more broadly in families and cultural, community and society systems.

Masten used the pandemic as an example of a turbulent time that catalyzed a “striking mobilization of multisystem resilience, demonstrating the capacity of a system to adapt successfully to challenges.”

Masten’s findings have shaped policy and practice in many fields outside psychology such as pediatrics, school counseling, social work and disaster response. People in more than 180 countries including Ukraine have taken part in her online course about the resilience of children in war and disaster.

A licensed psychologist in Minnesota since 1986, Masten holds a doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Minnesota and a bachelor’s degree from Smith College. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021 and has received mentoring and lifetime contribution awards from the American Psychological Association.

The $100,000 Grawemeyer prizes also honor seminal ideas in , , ���Ի���. Winners visit Louisville to accept their awards and give free talks on their winning ideas.

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Ryan Wetzler, director of Sleep Health Center in Louisville, will speak at 7 p.m. at Second Presbyterian Church, 3701 Old Brownsboro Road.��Wetzler, who is board certified in behavioral sleep medicine and clinical health psychology, will discuss the sleep system, new insomnia treatment guidelines and a revolutionary approach to treating the condition.

He practices cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), a treatment that helps people identify and replace thoughts and behaviors that cause or exacerbate sleep problems with habits that promote good sleep.

CBT-I helps people overcome the underlying causes of sleep problems, unlike sleep medications, which are advised only for short-term use – between four to six weeks – because of adverse effects that include learning and memory problems and dependence, Wetzler said.

“CBT-I actually cures a majority of those with chronic insomnia in an average of five treatment visits and enables nearly 80 percent of those taking sleep medication to discontinue use,” Wetzler said.

About 10 to 15 percent of adults experience chronic insomnia and 80-90 percent of depression and anxiety patients have sleep difficulties.

The “Building Hope” lecture series is sponsored by the .