Accepting students?  Dr. Smith is not accepting students for Fall 2026. 

Research Interests:

The study of resilience as the ability to bounce back from stress and thriving as the ability to learn, grow, and benefit from stress. The development of interventions that increase happiness and well-being in the context of stress and the challenges across the life span. Developing positive psychology classes that can increase happiness, wellbeing, and resilience. The potential for stories that embody the “hero’s journey” as the common human struggle with adversity for enabling us to be resilient and thrive. 

A. Resilience and Thriving

We developed a measure of resilience in 2008 that has over 9,000 citations in and a complementary measure of thriving in 2023. 

Smith, B.W., Dalen, J., Wiggins, K., Tooley, E., Christopher, P., & Bernard, J.  (2008).  The Brief Resilience Scale: Assessing the ability to bounce back.  International Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 15, 194-200.  

Smith, B., Albonico, K., Guzman, A., deCruz-dixon, N., Phan, A. & Schodt, K. (2023). The brief thriving scale: Assessing the ability to learn, grow, and find benefits in stressful events. International Journal of Wellbeing, 13(3), 134-150.

Our studies of resilience and thriving have focused on the identification of resources and interventions that may increase them. These include mindfulness, a sense of meaning and purpose in life, emotional regulation, emotional disclosure, gratitude, compassion, kindness, spirituality, and other strengths that have become the focus of positive psychology. 

The kinds of stressors and problems we have focused on have included health problems such as chronic pain, cancer, and cardiovascular disease. They have also included the chronic stressors and daily hassles faced by healthy adults and college students and traumatic stressors, such as natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and those experienced by first responders (e.g., firefighters). Here are some examples: 

Smith, B.W., Christopher, P. J., Bouldin, L. E., Tooley, E. M., Bernard, J. F., & Ortiz, J.A.  (2010).  Benefit finding predicts improved emotional health following cardiac rehabilitation.  R. E. Murphy (Ed.), Health Psychology. (pp. 113-125).  Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science.

Smith, B.W., Dalen, J., Bernard, J.F., & Baumgartner, K.B.  (2008). Posttraumatic growth in non-Hispanic white and Hispanic women with cervical cancer.  Journal of Psychosocial Oncology, 26, 91-109. 

B. Mindfulness Interventions

We have developed mindfulness-based interventions and those incorporating aspects of motivational interviewing and other acceptance-based approaches. Here are studies where we compared or adapted mindfulness-based interventions: 

Smith, B.W., Ford, C.G., & Steffen, L.E. (2019). The role of mindfulness in reactivity to daily stress in urban firefighters. Mindfulness, 10, 1603-1604.  

Ortiz, J.A., Smith, B.W., Shelley, B.M., & Erickson, K.S. (2019). Adapting mindfulness to engage Latinos and improve mental health in primary care: A pilot study. Mindfulness, 10, 2522-2531. 

Smith, B.W., Shelley, B.M., Sloan, A.L., Colleran, K., & Erickson, K. (2018). A Preliminary randomized controlled trial of a mindful eating intervention for post-menopausal obese women, Mindfulness, 9, 836-849. 

Smith, B.W., Shelley, B.M., Dalen, J., Wiggins, K., Tooley, E., & Bernard, J. (2008).  A pilot study comparing the effects of Mindfulness-Based and Cognitive-Behavioral Stress Reduction.  Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 14, 251-258.  

C. Positive Psychology

We developed face-to-face and online positive psychology classes that have shown to increase happiness and well-being both from the beginning to the end of the class and relative to other positive psychology classes:

 We developed a positive psychology workbook that is available on Amazon as a hard copy and also available as a free PDF:

Smith, B.W. (2021). Move from surviving to thriving: The positive psychology workbook for challenging times. Kindle Direct Publishing.

D. The Hero’s Journey

We are examining positive psychology in relation to Joseph’s Campbell idea of a common hero’s journey for enable people to enhance happiness and well-being in the context of the stresses and trauma of life. The value of a coherent and redemptive narrative is based in the work of people like James Pennebaker, Laura King, and Dan McAdams and its value in relation to stress is expressed in the following 

We developed a positive psychology textbook available on Amazon that uses the hero’s journey as guide to learning about and applying positive psychology:

Smith, B.W. (2018). Positive psychology for your hero’s journey: Discovering true and lasting happiness. Kindle Direct Publishing. 

We have also written about how the idea of a hero’s journey can enable people to be resilience and thrive in the context of disaster.

Smith, B.W. (2020). The hero’s journey to resilience and thriving in the context of disaster. In Stefan Schulenberg (Ed.), Positive Psychology and Disaster Mental Health (pp. 81-98). Springer.