Lisa Aspinwall

Introduction

Lisa G. Aspinwall is an American social and health psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Utah, where she directed the Health Cognition Lab and served as department chair from 2015 to 2018. She is best known for two things. The first is the concept of proactive coping, developed with Shelley E. Taylor: the observation that people often act to head off a problem long before it arrives, and that this future-oriented work is not the same thing as worrying about it. The second is her demonstration that optimism is not denial — that optimistic people attend more closely to threatening health information, not less.

She occupies an unusual position in relation to positive psychology. She has worked inside the field since its founding, co-editing A Psychology of Human Strengths, and she is also one of its more careful internal critics, having written explicitly about the "progress and pitfalls" of linking positive phenomena to health. Her recent work has moved towards predictive genetic testing, where the practical question is what people actually do when told they carry a mutation that raises their risk of cancer.

Early Life and Education

Aspinwall received her BA in psychology from Stanford University in 1987, graduating with honours and with distinction, and winning the university's Firestone Medal for Excellence in Research. She then went to the University of California, Los Angeles, where she took an MA in 1988 and a PhD in social psychology in 1991. At UCLA she received a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship and an NIMH Health Psychology Research Traineeship, and was given UCLA's Sigma Xi Outstanding Graduate Science Student Award.

Her doctoral work took shape in collaboration with Shelley E. Taylor, whose research on cognitive adaptation and positive illusions was then reshaping health psychology. The partnership produced a run of papers in the early 1990s on social comparison, on college adjustment, and on optimism among men at risk for AIDS — work that established the pattern Aspinwall has followed since: take a construct that sounds self-evidently good, and find out precisely what it does.

Academic and Professional Career

Aspinwall joined the University of Maryland in 1991 as an assistant professor, was promoted to associate professor in 1997, and received the university's Certificate of Teaching Excellence. In 2000 she moved to the University of Utah, where she was associate professor until 2013 and full professor thereafter. She chaired the psychology department from 2015 to 2018 and is a member of the Cancer Control and Population Sciences programme at the Huntsman Cancer Institute.

She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association (2007), the Association for Psychological Science, the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Society for Health Psychology. In 2000 she was second-place recipient of the John Marks Templeton Positive Psychology Prize for her work on optimism and resilience. She has served on the editorial boards of Psychology and Health, Psychological Science, and Motivation and Emotion, and has held grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Cancer Institute.

Alongside her research she co-founded two professional organisations aimed at scholars who are underrepresented in the field: the GLBTQ Alliance in Social and Personality Psychology (GASP) and the Disability Advocacy and Research Network (DARN). She has also written on anti-ableist teaching practice in introductory and social psychology courses.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Proactive coping

Aspinwall and Taylor's 1997 Psychological Bulletin paper, "A Stitch in Time: Self-Regulation and Proactive Coping," argued that the coping literature had systematically under-described the most common kind of coping. Existing models were reactive: something bad happens, then the person responds. Their account sets out five stages in which people accumulate resources, recognise a potential stressor, make an initial appraisal, take preliminary coping efforts, and elicit and use feedback — all before the event. Proactive coping, on this reading, is not anticipatory anxiety; it is work, and the resources it builds also change how a person appraises the threat when it finally arrives.

Distinguishing optimism from denial

The most persistent criticism of the positive-illusions literature was that optimistic beliefs might simply be avoidance in a nicer coat — that optimists look well-adjusted because they are not looking. Aspinwall and Brunhart tested this directly in 1996 by measuring where people directed their attention to health threats. Optimists attended more to threatening information than pessimists did, particularly when the threat was relevant and controllable. The result mattered beyond the specific finding: it meant the "illusions" debate could not be settled by asserting that optimism must be defensive, because the behavioural evidence pointed the other way.

Positive affect and self-regulation

Her 1998 Motivation and Emotion paper, "Rethinking the Role of Positive Affect in Self-Regulation," addressed a related assumption: that positive mood is a signal things are going well and therefore permits people to stop trying. She argued instead that positive affect often sustains engagement with difficult material, which complicates any simple mood-as-information account.

Caution about positive psychology's health claims

Aspinwall co-edited A Psychology of Human Strengths with Ursula Staudinger, a volume that set out the field's agenda, and separately assessed what positive psychology had and had not established about physical health. Her argument is that the field's enthusiasm has periodically outrun its data, that positive and negative phenomena need to be measured as distinct rather than opposite dimensions, and that the interesting questions are about mechanism rather than about whether optimism is good.

Predictive genetic testing

Since the 2000s her main empirical programme has examined how people understand genetic risk. Working with melanoma-prone families carrying CDKN2A/p16 mutations, she studies what people believe about a genetic result: whether they think the risk interacts with their own behaviour or environment, whether they think it can be modified, and whether a genetic explanation feels stigmatising or relieving. The applied aim is tailoring risk communication so that people actually follow screening and prevention advice. Recent work includes the FLARE randomised trial of a sun-protection intervention for the children of melanoma survivors, and studies of weight stigma among bariatric surgery patients.

Major Publications

  • "A Stitch in Time: Self-Regulation and Proactive Coping" (with Shelley E. Taylor, 1997, Psychological Bulletin) — The paper that defined proactive coping and gave it a five-stage structure.
  • "Distinguishing Optimism from Denial: Optimistic Beliefs Predict Attention to Health Threats" (with Susanne M. Brunhart, 1996, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin) — The behavioural rebuttal to the claim that optimism is defensive.
  • "Rethinking the Role of Positive Affect in Self-Regulation" (1998, Motivation and Emotion) — Her argument that positive mood does not simply license disengagement.
  • A Psychology of Human Strengths (edited with Ursula M. Staudinger, 2003) — The volume that set the research agenda for positive psychology, including its own open questions.
  • "The Value of Positive Psychology for Health Psychology: Progress and Pitfalls in Examining the Relation of Positive Phenomena to Health" — Her assessment of what the field has actually established about physical health.
  • "Priority of Risk (But Not Perceived Magnitude of Risk) Predicts Improved Sun-Protection Behavior Following Genetic Counseling for Familial Melanoma" (2020, Annals of Behavioral Medicine) — A finding that whether people rank a risk as their top concern predicts behaviour better than how large they say it is.
  • "The Family Lifestyles, Actions and Risk Education (FLARE) Study" (2023, Contemporary Clinical Trials) — Protocol for a randomised trial of sun protection for children of melanoma survivors.

Impact and Legacy

Aspinwall's influence is largest in health psychology, where proactive coping is now a standard category and where the optimism-versus-denial question is treated as settled in her favour. Her work is heavily cited, and she has been unusually willing to publish the limits of her own field's claims.

The criticisms of her work are mostly the criticisms of the research programmes she works in:

Optimism's link to physical health remains contested. Her strongest empirical result is about attention and behaviour: optimists engage with threat rather than avoiding it. The further claim — that optimism lengthens life or prevents disease — rests largely on prospective observational studies in which optimism is entangled with baseline health, health behaviour, and socioeconomic position. Interventions designed to raise optimism have not been shown to change mortality. Aspinwall herself has been careful here, but the popular version of her work routinely overstates it.

Proactive coping is measured by self-report. The construct is assessed largely through questionnaires such as the Proactive Coping Inventory, in cross-sectional designs where the direction of causation is hard to establish. It also overlaps substantially with conscientiousness and general planfulness, and it is not always clear that the scales are capturing something distinct from those traits.

The genetic-testing samples are narrow. The work on familial melanoma depends on kindreds carrying a rare mutation, studied largely in Utah and overwhelmingly non-Hispanic White. What people believe about a CDKN2A result, and what they do about it, may not generalise to common-variant risk, to other ancestries, or to settings without access to specialist genetic counselling.

The positive-illusions dispute is not fully resolved. Critics such as Colvin and Block, and Shedler, Mayman, and Manis, argued that self-report measures cannot distinguish genuine illusion from accurate self-knowledge, because there is no independent criterion for accuracy. Her 1996 study answers one version of this by using attention and behaviour rather than self-report as the outcome, but it does not settle whether optimists' beliefs about their own risk are actually more accurate.

And her own caution is the sharpest assessment. Her argument about progress and pitfalls applies to her own literature as much as to anyone else's: the interesting work is about mechanism, and the field's habit of treating positive phenomena as the reverse of negative ones is a measurement error rather than a discovery.

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References

  • Aspinwall, L. G., & Taylor, S. E. (1997). A stitch in time: Self-regulation and proactive coping. Psychological Bulletin, 121(3), 417-436.

Last updated: 2026-10-20

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