Top header image, left to right: Colleagues Elizabeth Hinz, Maya Marchelle Buckner, Ann Masten, Juliana Sapienza, Daniel Gumnit, Margo Hurrle, and Marueen Seiwert. Hinz, Hurrle, and Seiwert were Minneapolis Public School collaborators; Gumnit was CEO of People Serving People; and Buckner and Sapienza were students who worked with Masten on multiple community-based projects.
Ann Masten and resilience in human development
Resilience is not a personality trait. That definition drives Regents Professor of Child Development Ann Masten crazy.
“If you’re a persistent person or a conscientious person or an easygoing person, those are all personality traits,” she says. “Resilience is a capacity that’s generated by many, many factors.”
Masten describes resilience as the capacity and processes for overcoming challenges, but it is always in flux, because all the influences that shape a person’s capacity are as well. “The circumstances we live in are always changing,” she explains, “and so are our bodies and minds and resources. Whether we are sick or tired, alone or in the company of a close friend, all can influence our capacity for resilience. Every one of these influences plays a role in how much capacity we have at any given time to deal with something.” Social networks such as families, friends, schools, communities, and health care and safety systems also contribute to one’s ability to adapt in the face of adversity.
“The study of resilience has surged over the past five decades and the topic is even more relevant now, with global conflicts, rising disasters, and the potential for future pandemics,” Masten says. And during those same 50 years, she has been at the forefront of resilience research, starting in 1976 as a graduate student in clinical psychology and continuing as a postdoc researcher until she joined the Institute of Child Development (ICD) faculty in 1986. This May, Masten retired from ICD, leaving a long and vibrant legacy.
The road to ICD
“I think I’ve always been interested in how you adapt to challenges,” Masten says. “I was undoubtedly drawn to this domain of research by growing up in a military family, frequently moving with all the adjustment that entails, and experiencing war indirectly through the service of my father and many other family members of my friends.”
Serendipity also played a part, Masten says. When she was studying psychology at Smith College in Massachusetts, she was given the opportunity to interview for a position at the National Institute of Mental Health. After graduation, she worked there as a research assistant to David Shakow, someone she had never heard of, but who was a renowned researcher in psychopathology. Through Shakow, she met his good friend Norman Garmezy, a psychology professor at the University of Minnesota and the “grandfather” of resilience science.
“He would talk to me about his new work, and I became intrigued,” Masten says. Garmezy was studying what was then called stress-resistant or “invulnerable” children.
At this point, Masten had decided to enroll in graduate school and thought Garmezy was someone she wanted to work with. “He recruited me to the psychology department to study clinical psychology, and I was fortunate to arrive at an important time in the developing field of research on resilience in children,” she says.
It was at this time that she also met Dante Cicchetti, now an ICD emeritus professor and another giant in the field, but then a fellow grad student, four years her senior. They met through a program that matched seasoned students with those newly arrived to help ease their transition to grad school. “I was her big brother, and she was my little sister,” Cicchetti says, adding that it was clear that Masten was the most outstanding new student.
Cicchetti could see Masten’s kindness and compassion from the outset, which informed much of her later work and career. “She always wanted to do good for people who were at risk for mental illness, homelessness, and trauma,” he says.
After Cicchetti graduated, he took a professorship position at Harvard and later at the University of Rochester. It was at Rochester that Cicchetti invited Masten—then a still wet-behind-the-ears PhD grad—to present her early work on resilience at a developmental psychopathology symposium. “Every other contributor was a well-known investigator, but her presentation was outstanding,” he says.
Masten reciprocated when she joined ICD as faculty and later served as department chair. She recruited Cicchetti to come back to the department and they have been close colleagues ever since, writing chapters and articles and co-editing special issues of Development and Psychopathology, a journal founded by Cicchetti and published by Cambridge University Press. “We always worked well together,” Cicchetti says. “I have the greatest admiration for her work. She will never be forgotten in our field.”
On resilience
How do children overcome adversity? What makes a difference? These questions motivated the study of resilience, with the ultimate goal of understanding resilience well enough to improve the lives of people at risk due to past, present, or likely future adversities. “Our research team, as well as many others around the world, was focused on understanding resilience during childhood and early adulthood,” Masten says. “The whole idea was a practical one. If we could understand how it is that some kids do all right or recover, that would provide us with very valuable guidance in terms of what we could do to help more kids get through difficult times.”
Answers to the questions posed by Masten and others turned out to be so consistent that she came up with a “short list” of widely observed resilience factors in the lives of children. Indeed, these factors have held up remarkably well over decades.
“What was striking to me and others about the widely reported predictors of resilience was not only their ubiquity across cultures and situations, but their ordinariness,” Masten says. “The ingredients associated with resilience to adversity looked a lot like a recipe for promoting positive development. The capacity for resilience does not require rare resources or skills, but common, everyday capabilities and resources many people develop in life through the interactions of human biology, families, communities, and cultures.”
These common, everyday capabilities and resources are what Masten came to term “ordinary magic.” She began using the descriptor in the 1990s and later used it as the title of her most-cited paper, “Ordinary Magic. Resilience Processes in Development” (American Psychologist, 2001). Subsequently, she expanded the concept into book length—the second edition of Ordinary Magic: Resilience in Development (The Guilford Press) was published in May of this year.
On collaboration
It is multiple systems working together that build capacity. And we build capacity in our children the same way. “It’s not one person who builds the capacity of a child,” Masten says. “Many people are involved in nurturing the development of children, and our school systems play a central role along with parents in building capacity, not just for the now, but for the future.”
Masten has been involved for many years working with schools on projects designed to improve a child’s experience. One such collaboration began more than 20 years ago with Elizabeth Hinz, who served as the district liaison for homeless and highly mobile students for Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS). Hinz was responsible for ensuring that the district fully met the requirements of federal legislation to identify and serve children who were homeless and highly mobile.
“This involved working with all shelters, school districts, and other organizations that served homeless and highly mobile children and families within the city and suburbs,” Hinz says. “I worked with staff to ensure the children were identified, enrolled, and attending school, and that the schools were meeting the needs of these students.”
Hinz’ work as an advocate for these children and youth led her directly to Masten when she found one of her research papers from the late 1980s discussing homeless children and families. “I promptly contacted her,” Hinz says. “I felt immediately that documenting the impact of homelessness on students’ academic progress would be valuable and important.”
Masten organized a series of research projects with her graduate students over the course of 30-plus years to work with Minneapolis Public School staff, shelter staff, teachers, administrators, and service providers, all documenting needs and resilience factors for children and youth who were identified as homeless and highly mobile. “A common theme in many of these research projects was to look at individual differences in order to identify malleable influences that are amenable to interventions,” Hinz says. “This research helped to elevate our work from what felt like applying necessary Band-Aids to observing and thinking more deeply about the students’ needs and a school system response. What could we do to support students’ natural resilience? Staff training and working with the students could be done in a much more thoughtful way.” Results from these projects were published in a number of different journals, and numerous presentations have been made to academic and governance groups, locally and nationally. “This work has had a significant impact on school districts’ work with students,” Hinz says. “Simple human things like consistent warm greetings and the more complicated, like housing and steady employment, are all necessary to build upon children’s natural resilience and help them to be healthy and strong. Ann’s message of ordinary magic is magic itself.”
Another long-term school partnership was with Cynthia Hillyer, who was the director of early childhood education for MPS, on a longitudinal study showing the value of executive function assessments for early childhood screening (ECS). ECS is mandatory in Minnesota—public schools offer screening to all residents in the community. Masten was working on standardizing an executive function screening tool for the National Institute of Health and partnered with Hillyer in 2010 to collect data via parental questionnaires to improve the effectiveness of the tool. “We ended up in a 15-year collaboration,” Hillyer says. “We’re still continuing. Even now I’m reviewing a paper for one of her students who used data from our original study.”
What Hillyer appreciates the most from the partnership with Masten is how it covers all angles. “I was from the practice side, and she was the research side,” she says. “We learned so many things. We learned new interventions to improve outcomes for kids who have a touchpoint with child protection or for children experiencing poverty. We were able to change how we support parents at the point of service. Ann really cares about that, what’s happening in real life.”
And that’s what makes Masten special, Hillyer says. “She’s an extraordinary mentor. And an extraordinary collaborator,” she says. “She looks at not just what would add value to her as a researcher, but ways to contribute to humanity.”
New generation on resilience work
Masten can point to many highlights of her work over the years at the University, including joining the Project Competence Longitudinal Study upon her arrival and continuing it for more than 20 years. The study examined risk and resilience in 205 children and their families and generated many subsequent research publications. Masten also helped establish a joint training program in developmental psychopathology and clinical science, which linked two leading departments (Psychology and the Institute of Child Development) and attracted extraordinary talent for Minnesota and beyond in both practice and research.
Perhaps her most proud accomplishment, however, is mentoring and teaching outstanding students who later went on to have major impacts on research and practice. Jelena Obradović, now a professor in the developmental and psychological sciences program at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, obtained her PhD from ICD in 2007. She was advised by Masten for five years. They continue to keep in close touch, having collaborated on several manuscripts over the years.
“Ann has influenced my work by showing me how to form and maintain successful research–practice partnerships before that was the buzz word,” Obradović says. As mentioned, Masten was one of the first to identify unique risk factors among children and families living in emergency homeless shelters. This work created an opportunity for Obradović to conduct her dissertation work on the development of executive functioning skills among young children living in a homeless shelter.
“This was a transformative experience for me, as it taught me how to conduct community-based research and helped me refine my research interests and career goals,” Obradović says. “Ann’s commitment to translating research into policy and practice has inspired me to pursue applied work that makes a more direct impact in children’s lives.”
Obradović says Masten’s commitment to nurturing young scholars is truly rare. “I spent many hours in Ann’s office discussing empirical models or theoretical issues that she was puzzling over,” she says. “Ann’s genuine interest in what I had to contribute would sometimes make me forget that I was only her graduate student. Ann has great respect for her students’ ideas, and she treats her students as true collaborators. Every day, I strive to emulate her in my own interactions with students, and to continue her legacy of extraordinary scholarship and mentorship.”
Katie Lingras is an associate professor in UMN’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the director for Inclusive Excellence and Well-Being.
She attended graduate school at ICD in its developmental psychopathology and clinical sciences track beginning in 2006. Masten was her co-advisor in grad school, along with Nicki Crick, who passed away in 2011. “I came into graduate school planning to work with Nicki but was quickly engaged in Ann’s work thanks to her open lab meetings and welcoming nature,” Lingras says.
One of the first things Lingras learned about Masten is that she is incredibly relationship-oriented, she says. “A lot of academic–community partnerships feel extractive to the community partner,” she says. “With Ann, it was always about building the relationship first and determining how an academic research partnership could also help to meet their needs. I took that forward in my work with her, as well as the work I have done since. It continues to be one of the most important unspoken lessons—and truly gifts—that she gave me.”
Lingras says Masten’s relational approach extends beyond the work—she cares about the students she supervises and takes the time to get to know them as people. “Alongside sharing tips about statistical analyses, she would share her favorite spots to go for dinner or dessert and enjoyed treating us to the occasional Cafe Latte on special occasions,” Lingras says. “She brought the best of Minnesota into the lab—making sure to show off her favorite traditions, like fall apple tastings, for those of us who were not from here, to help us acclimate to our new home.”
This attribute of Masten has rubbed off on Lingras when she herself meets and gets to know new students. “I share my own favorite Minnesota pastimes with those who have just moved here,” she says. “I have heard from so many that modeling the work/life balance and interests means a lot to them, and I often comment that they have Ann to thank for instilling me with that value so early on in my career.”
For decades, Ann Masten has worked with schools on projects designed to improve the child’s experience. (Photo by Dawn Villella)
A lasting legacy
Masten’s retirement in May coincided with the 100th anniversary of ICD at the University. Since many former students would be in attendance, Masten hosted a reunion party at the Campus Club in Coffman Memorial Union.
“It was amazing,” she says. “It made me feel fantastic. There were like 60 people there. Some were clinicians, others were becoming well-known young scholars. You really get a sense of an overarching body of influence when you see your students. That was one of the things I loved about being a professor. Your real legacy is the work that they do.”
Header photos: background by Famitsay Tamayo, pexels.com, and group photo by Patrick O'Leary, University Marcomm
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The Masten Award supports developmental psychology doctoral students, with a preference for those pursuing research on resilience and development.
