Dov Shmotkin

Dov Shmotkin (; born 1949) is Professor Emeritus in the School of Psychological Sciences and former head of the Herczeg Institute on Aging at Tel Aviv University.

Biography

Dov Shmotkin was born in 1949 in Rishon Le-Zion, Israel. He is Professor Emeritus in the School of Psychological Sciences and former head of the Herczeg Institute on Aging, both at Tel Aviv University, where he also received his Ph.D. He is a senior clinical psychologist and was formerly the head of the clinical psychology graduate program in the School of Psychological Sciences. Shmotkin was Visiting Scholar in the Institute of Gerontology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1988–89), and Honorary Fellow in the Institute on Aging at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1996–97), USA. He has served as a senior researcher and member in the research teams of prominent nationwide surveys on the Israeli older population, namely the ''Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Aging Study'' (CALAS) and the Israeli branch of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE-Israel). He also directed a project that harmonized databases of CALAS, SHARE-Israel, and other studies of Israeli aging populations. Dov Shmotkin was appointed as Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America.

Research

Dov Shmotkin's scientific work has solidified the dialectical approach to human happiness and suffering, emphasizing developmental paths along adulthood and old age.
His main concern has been to explore psychological mechanisms whereby people can maintain well-being and resilience in the face of life adversities and aging processes that may inflict trauma, decline and loss.
In his conceptual model, entitled ''The Pursuit of Happiness in a Hostile World'', Shmotkin, along with associates who made vital contributions (mainly his former doctoral students), have developed a dynamic view on the intertwinement of resilience and vulnerability.
The conceptual and empirical work of Shmotkin in the domains of gerontology sought to elucidate how wellness, adaptational functioning and self-fulfillment might counter frailty, disability and disintegration in later life.
The emerging theme that unifies these scientific works is Shmotkin's humanistic quest for more refined and differential views over the interfaces of well-being and distress in human lives.

Shmotkin’s scientific contributions have been recognized by scholars worldwide. He was included in 100 top international experts in positive psychology, presented in The World Book of Happiness (L. Bormans, Editor-in-Chief, published 2010 in English and multiple languages). Shmotkin was included in the top 2% impactful scientists within the subfield of gerontology according to the world ranking of scientists by Elsevier BV and Stanford University (2023). He was named a Top Scholar (included in the top 0.5% of all scholars worldwide) for lifetime outstanding performance in the research areas of subjective well-being, life satisfaction, and well-being by ScholarGPS (Meta Analytics, 2022). He was also included in the 2000 longevity leaders in science, business, policy and thought across the world (Longevity International, with Aging Analytics Agency, 2020).

The Pursuit of Happiness in a Hostile World

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).
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. The model's concept of ''hostile-world scenario'' 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 disasters 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 adverse conditions in life, both prospectively and retrospectively. 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 dangerous world. Research has shown that personal modes of engagement with hostile-world scenarios (e.g., resorting to distressful versus proactive beliefs) may intervene in relationships between a presumably antecedent position (e.g., a stressful condition) and mental health outcomes. Due to its multifaceted composition, the concept of hostile-world scenario also exposed further derivative themes such as perceived threats of evil in individuals with traumatic backgrounds.

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. 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.

The Multiple Appearances of Happiness

In line with its dynamic features, Shmotkin's work explicated multiple modules and configurations of happiness. 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.
Notably, some of these types were internally incongruent (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.
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 congruent and incongruent feelings, which were found associated with current subjective well-being, reactions to trauma, and coping with aging.
These varied modules, both within one's subjective well-being and in combination with meaning in life, 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
and well-being. 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.

The Endurance of Holocaust Survivors and Long-Term Effects of Trauma in Life

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,
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
and their ability to incorporate the trauma into a coherent life story. In reviews of research on Holocaust survivors, Shmotkin explicated how long-term effects of the survivors’ trauma interacted with aging processes and family constellation.

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.

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.
The investigatory team found that cumulative adversity, particularly of the self-oriented kind, was detrimental in various domains of physical and mental functioning.

Gerontological Investigations: Exploring the Underpinnings of Aging

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,
certain psychosocial factors retained their distinctive predictive effect.

Another main concern in Shmotkin's gerontological work has been the role of individuals’ time perspective in understanding later life's phenomena.
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. In these inquiries, notions of time perspective appeared fully embedded in the adjustment of people to their old age.
In other directions, Shmotkin participated in a series of studies on the challenges of fatherhood and aging among gay versus heterosexual men as well as on the particular vulnerability of gay men who were offspring of Holocaust survivors. He 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,
the inconsistency between objective and subjective indicators of one's memory in old age,
the loosening relations between physical dysfunction and mental wellness in very old age, and the agonizing affliction of bereavement over the loss of a child among aged parents.

References

External links

Aging in a Hostile World:
A conference for the presentation of a study on the pursuit of happiness in a hostile world (July 2017).
in French


"Beyond Good and Bad":
On the work of Prof. Dov Shmotkin. Published in ''The World Book of Happiness: The Knowledge and Wisdom of One Hundred Happiness Professors''. Author and Editor-in-Chief: Leo Bormans. Singapore: Page One Publishing, 2010.

"Re-evaluating the Time of Your Life":
An interview with Prof. Dov Shmotkin about his study. Released by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (originally published by the American Friends of Tel Aviv University), October 2010.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Shmotkin, Dov
1949 births
Living people
Academic staff of Tel Aviv University
Israeli psychologists