Dov Shmotkin

It is widely held that happiness is achieved through two major systems: subjective well-being (people's evaluations of the satisfaction and pleasantness in their lives) and meaning in life (people's conceptions that they lead a life corresponding to their values and potentials).[15] While most approaches regard happiness as a mental outcome, Shmotkin's model considers it a process. Accordingly, both subjective well-being and meaning in life systems regulate, or otherwise reconstruct, personal conceptions of hostile-world scenarios.[10] The concept of hostile-world scenario[7] is central for depicting the image that each individual has about actual or potential threats to one's life or, more broadly, to one's physical and mental integrity. The hostile-world scenario dwells on self-beliefs about catastrophes and inflictions such as accidents, violence, natural disasters, wars, illness, breakup of close relationships, losses of beloved ones, aging, and death. For most people, the hostile-world scenario is an adaptive mechanism for scanning potentially adverse conditions in life. Yet, when under-activated, it may induce a fool's paradise with reckless behaviors and, when over-activated, it may produce a horrible sense of living in a disastrous world.[16][17][18]

The ever-active negotiations between the happiness-promoting systems and the hostile-world scenario constitute the dynamic core of the model. The pursuit of happiness, rather than happiness itself, provides individuals with a favorable psychological environment that allows them to function competently despite the imminence of hostile-world scenarios.[7] The study of these dynamics exposes various mechanisms of resilience whereby the happiness-promoting systems, in threatening conditions, may amplify each other or possibly compensate for each other. Non-resilient mechanisms are also possible when hostile-world scenarios involve increased depletion and vulnerability. Mechanisms of these kinds, along with related tenets of Shmotkin's model, have been accumulatively illuminated by a body of empirical findings derived from diverse populations.[19][14][20][21][22] Besides empirical works that have been published, the model has been evoking an array of validation endeavors that currently expand the underlying conceptualization and still await publication.

In line with its dynamic features, Shmotkin's work explicated multiple modules and configurations of happiness.[7] For example, different synchronic combinations between dimensions of subjective well-being (e.g., life satisfaction, positive affect) produced differential types of well-being among individuals.[23] Notably, some of these types were internally inconsistent (e.g., people that were high on life satisfaction but low on positive affect). Also important were diachronic combinations where subjective well-being was queried in relation to different time zones (past, present, future), thus depicting varying temporal trajectories that conveyed different narratives about how one's well-being evolved along the individual's life course.[24][25] Shmotkin also investigated how people conceived their well-being in relation to their past life, as reflected in the concept of anchor periods, referring to paramount experiences in one's remembered past (e.g., “the happiest period in my life,” “the most miserable period in my life”). The studies showed that people formed an emotional matrix of happiness and suffering in past periods of their lives. This matrix reflected both consistent and inconsistent feelings, which were found associated with current subjective well-being, reactions to trauma, and coping with aging.[26][14][27][28] These varied modules, both within one's subjective well-being[7] and in combination with meaning in life,[15] constitute diverse options of coping with adversities in life.

Through his emphasis on multiple appearances of happiness, Shmotkin advocated the use of person-centered, rather than variable-centered, methods in order to delineate unattended configurations of human functioning[29] and well-being.[8] Thus, the use of this approach contrasted types of individuals that maintained congruity in their relative standing on related variables (e.g., subjective well-being and meaning in life) and types that were incongruent in this regard. Such incongruent types may indicate conflicting or ambivalent inclinations within individuals, but may also encompass adaptational advantages. This notion is in line with Shmotkin's dialectical view that resilience and vulnerability, mainly in disadvantageous and distressful conditions, co-reside within the same individuals.[11][30]

In Shmotkin's studies, Holocaust survivors present a paradigm of extreme trauma happening early in life with sequelae lingering up to their old age. In his approach, the trauma is a test case for the functionality of the happiness-promoting systems in tackling the intensified hostile-world scenario and suggesting a world of normalcy. By studying Holocaust survivors in an array of community and national samples,[31][32][33][34] Shmotkin and his colleagues highlighted a consistent conclusion that older survivors usually manifested general resilience in most life domains along with specific vulnerabilities in pertinent psychosocial issues. Coping with the trauma was modulated by properties of the survivors’ time perspective on their period of traumatization[35] and their ability to incorporate the trauma into a coherent life story.[28] In reviews of research on Holocaust survivors, Shmotkin explicated how long-term effects of the survivors’ trauma interacted with aging processes[30][13] and family constellation.[36]

As part of the attempts to advance methodological approaches that facilitated new revelations, an intricate consideration in Shmotkin's studies on Holocaust survivors was the choice of focal and comparison groups. The question “Who is a survivor?” proved uneasy, and was approached by combining both subjective and factual criteria. It was also expounded that the habitual use of merely one comparison group in past studies on survivors was not methodologically suitable, and several different groups were actually required for allowing instructive comparability with the survivors’ grouping.[31][32]

At another level, Shmotkin examined long-term traumatic effects by national data from the Israeli branch of Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE-Israel). Shmotkin and his collaborators delineated the notion of cumulative adversity, which typically characterized stressful experiences along biographical courses of older people, and further differentiated between self-oriented (primary harm was to the self) and other-oriented (primary harm was to another person) foci of potentially traumatic events.[37] The investigatory team found that cumulative adversity, particularly of the self-oriented kind, was detrimental in various domains of physical and mental functioning.[38][39]

Shmotkin's dialectical view extends into his gerontological work, where aging and old age constantly reflect opposite, yet interactive, vectors of resilience versus vulnerability and survival versus finitude. His work largely dwells on epidemiological national surveys (mainly CALAS and SHARE-Israel; see above), where he often juxtaposed concomitants of physical health and mental health. Thus, while physical factors were found increasingly dominant in predicting people's mortality in old age,[40][29] certain psychosocial factors retained their distinctive predictive effect.[41][42]

Another main concern in Shmotkin's gerontological work has been the role of individuals’ time perspective in understanding later life's phenomena.[43] At old age, in an apparent paradoxical fashion, people usually preserve relatively high levels of happiness, even following harsh adversity in the past and in the face of a foreshortened future. Besides this inclination, Shmotkin's studies showed modes whereby older people sorted out positive and negative feelings from their past and buffered fears about their future.[14][27][44] In these inquiries, notions of time perspective appeared fully embedded in the adjustment of people to their old age.[45][25] In other directions, Shmotkin was also attracted to study aging-related issues that bore intriguing, yet scarcely examined, implications. Such issues included the continuity of adult children's bonds with their deceased parents,[46] the inconsistency between objective and subjective indicators of one's memory in old age,[47] the loosening relations between physical dysfunction and mental wellness in very old age,[12] the agonizing affliction of bereavement over the loss of a child among aged parents,[48] and the challenges of fatherhood and aging among gay versus heterosexual men.[49][50]