Adjustment and Well-Being (AWB)

The general focus of the Adjustment and Well Being cluster is on understanding the correlates and causes (and ultimately the promotion) of the psychological welfare of individuals. The name of the cluster reflects the idea that subjective well-being requires constant adaptation, or adjustment, to challenges and threats to well-being. These challenges may have many different sources, emanating both from the culture or society and from individual experiences. For example, modern societies have dramatically reduced the pain and suffering caused by many illnesses. However, this modern lifestyle, with its abundant supply of food, has created new diseases such as obesity and anorexia, which produce their own kinds of pain and suffering, both physical and psychological. Other societal changes requiring adjustment include increasing mobility and dual-income families. At the individual level, individuals must constantly adjust to new situations resulting from day-to-day fluctuations in the positive and negative events they experience, from both normal and abnormal processes of development, and from unforeseen crises (e.g., illness, death of a loved one, disability). 

The influence of adjustment on well-being is best studied from a wide range of perspectives within and beyond psychology and from those that transcend the traditional laboratory psychology experiment. The Adjustment and Well-Being cluster is as much committed to a methodology involving the ecological study of behavior and experiences in naturalistic settings as it is defined by its theoretical focus. As examples of such methodologies, people record their daily activities or experiences for a few weeks or are observed in their homes or other natural environments.

Faculty Members

Andersen, Judith
biopsychosocial health psychology; severe stress, mental and physical health; trauma, psychophysiology, LGBT health, posttraumatic stress disorder and chronic illness

Impett, Emily A.
social psychology, relationships, well-being, sexuality, quantitative methods, prosocial emotions

Kamenetsky, Stuart
social development; exceptionality in human learning, disability and giftedness; cross-cultural psychology.

Malti, Tina
developmental and clinical child psychology, adaptive development, moral emotions, resilience, mental health in school and out-of-school time settings

Polivy, Janet
eating behaviour; dieting; self-regulation/self-change; eating disorders; risk factors; Drug responsiveness; emotion recognition

Schimmack, Ulrich
personality and well-being; happiness; environmental factors

Smith, Mary Lou
disorders of central nervous system in children; epilepsy; behavior and neuropsychology; long-term effects of epilepsy surgery; neurodevelopment and human Immunodeficiency virus (HIV); spatial memory

Urbszat, Dax
personality, social, forensic and abnormal psychology.