Stephen Joseph

Introduction

Stephen Joseph is a British psychologist and psychotherapist at the University of Nottingham, where he convenes the Human Flourishing Research Group in the School of Education. He is one of the two or three researchers most responsible for establishing posttraumatic growth as a legitimate object of study, and he has spent as much of his career cautioning against the field's excesses as promoting it.

His position is more equivocal than the label suggests. Joseph argues that the assumption running through much of clinical practice — that a serious trauma leaves a person permanently damaged — is not supported by the evidence, and that some people reconstruct a life they judge better than the one they had. He also argues that the trauma industry medicalizes ordinary suffering, that the growth construct is measured badly, and that telling survivors they ought to grow can become its own form of pressure.

Early Life and Education

Joseph trained at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, now part of King's College London, where his doctoral research examined disaster survivors and how they readjust socially after the event. That work placed him at the point where clinical psychology met the study of extreme events, at a time when the literature on trauma was overwhelmingly a literature on disorder.

He is a chartered psychologist of the British Psychological Society and registered with the Health and Care Professions Council as both a health psychologist and a counselling psychologist, and he practised as a therapist alongside his academic post.

Academic and Professional Career

Joseph was appointed professor at the University of Nottingham in 2006, in the School of Sociology and Social Policy, and moved to the School of Education in 2013. He co-directed the Centre for Trauma, Resilience and Growth, run jointly with Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust, where he was honorary consultant psychologist in psychotherapy, and now convenes the Human Flourishing Research Group. He teaches on the counselling and psychotherapy programs and is a registered coaching psychologist.

Much of his empirical and conceptual work was done with P. Alex Linley, and the pair edited the two volumes that defined the field's first decade: Positive Psychology in Practice (2004) and Trauma, Recovery, and Growth (2008).

Major Contributions to Psychology

Charting the territory

Joseph and Linley's 2004 review of 39 studies established the basic descriptive facts about what they preferred to call positive change. Reports of growth after adversity appear in roughly 30 to 70 percent of survivors across an extraordinary range of events: transport and shipping disasters, earthquakes and hurricanes, combat, rape and sexual assault, child abuse, cancer, heart attack, brain and spinal injury, HIV, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, bereavement, divorce and immigration. Growth reports were associated with higher socioeconomic status and education, younger age, optimism and extraversion, social support, and problem-focused, acceptance and positive-reinterpretation coping.

The same review documented the definitional mess the field inherited. Posttraumatic growth, stress-related growth, benefit finding, perceived benefits, thriving and adversarial growth were being used more or less interchangeably for constructs that came from different epistemological positions, and Joseph and Linley argued explicitly for keeping the term positive change when the theoretical commitments were not warranted.

Organismic valuing theory

With Linley he set out an organismic valuing theory of growth through adversity in 2005. The claim is that human beings have an intrinsic tendency toward development, that a traumatic event shatters the assumptive world a person has been operating with, and that growth consists in the organism's own movement toward reconstructing that world more adequately. Trauma does not produce growth as its effect; it creates the conditions in which a reconstructive process either gets going or does not.

The metaphor Joseph uses in What Doesn't Kill Us is the broken vase: the vessel can be glued back into its old shape, but a person can also assemble the fragments into something new, a mosaic that holds the memory in a different arrangement. The accompanying THRIVE model sets out six steps — taking stock, hoping, rewriting the narrative, identifying changes, valuing the changes, and expressing growth in action.

Measurement

Joseph has been unusually attentive to the instruments. With William Yule and Ruth Williams he developed the Changes in Outlook Questionnaire in 1993, one of the first tools built for this purpose. Later came the Psychological Well-Being Post-Traumatic Changes Questionnaire, with John Maltby, Alex Wood and Stephen Regel in 2012, and the twelve-item Positive Functioning Inventory with Maltby in 2014, which places distress and well-being on a single continuum rather than treating them as opposites.

Humanistic and person-centred work

Joseph is a leading figure in what is sometimes called the second wave of positive psychology, which draws on humanistic psychology and the person-centred tradition rather than on the cognitive and hedonic framing associated with Martin Seligman and the movement's first decade. Where the first wave asked what makes life pleasant or engaging, the second asks what makes a life authentic and worth living, and it treats distress and well-being as points on one continuum rather than as separate systems.

His 2016 book Authentic argues that well-being research needs a defensible concept of authenticity, and he has written on the person-centred approach in both counselling and education. More recent work has turned to young people, including the effects of school bullying and of being a young carer, and he has written regularly for general audiences in outlets such as The Huffington Post and Psychology Today.

Major Publications

  • Joseph, S., Williams, R. and Yule, W. (1993). Changes in Outlook Questionnaire
  • Joseph, S. and Linley, P. A. (2005). "Positive adjustment to threatening events: An organismic valuing theory of growth through adversity." Review of General Psychology, 9(3), 262 to 280
  • Joseph, S. and Linley, P. A. (eds.) Positive Psychology in Practice, 2004
  • Joseph, S. and Linley, P. A. (eds.) Trauma, Recovery, and Growth, 2008
  • What Doesn't Kill Us: The New Psychology of Posttraumatic Growth, 2011
  • Authentic: How to Be Yourself and Why It Matters, 2016

Impact and Legacy

Joseph did more than anyone in Britain to move trauma research away from a purely deficit model, and his work with Linley supplied the field with its standard reviews and one of its few theories. The Centre for Trauma, Resilience and Growth and the Human Flourishing Research Group trained a generation of researchers working on growth, and the broken vase metaphor has travelled well beyond academic literature.

The criticism is severe, and Joseph has been unusual in publishing it himself. The core problem is measurement. Nearly all posttraumatic growth findings come from retrospective self-report: respondents rate where they are now, recall where they were before, compute a difference and attribute it to the event. Frazier, Tennen, Gavian, Park, Tomich and Tashiro tested this directly in 2009, measuring the relevant domains before and after a trauma. Scores on the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory were essentially unrelated to actual change; perceived growth was associated with increased distress whereas actual growth was associated with decreased distress; and perceived growth, but not actual growth, tracked positive reinterpretation coping. Yanez and colleagues later replicated the finding. The conclusion was that the instrument measures a coping style, not a change.

Coyne and Tennen went further in a 2010 critique of positive psychology in cancer care, arguing that researchers in the area were either unaware of the recall literature or had decided to ignore it, and that a construct generating hundreds of articles continued to be studied with methods that cannot answer the question.

Joseph's response has been to concede the substance while resisting the conclusion. He has written that people deprecate past selves to enhance present ones, that illusory growth is real and may be functional as a coping process, and that perceived growth has consequences regardless of its accuracy as a change report. He has also been a public critic of the growth mandate — the expectation, now common in cancer care and organizational life, that survivors should emerge better than they were — and of the medicalization of distress by a trauma industry with a commercial interest in diagnosis.

The clearest measure of his posture is editorial. Trauma, Recovery, and Growth, the volume he co-edited in 2008, contains a chapter by Julian Ford, Howard Tennen and David Albert titled "A Contrarian View of Growth Following Adversity," followed by Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun on the paradox of struggling with trauma. Joseph commissioned the strongest available case against the construct he is best known for, and printed it next to his own position.

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References

  • Joseph, S., & Linley, P. A. (2005). Positive adjustment to threatening events. Review of General Psychology, 9(3), 262-280.

Last updated: 2026-10-25

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