Positive Psychology Perspectives Across the Cancer Continuum: Meaning, Spirituality, and Growth

Abstract

This chapter takes a positive psychology perspective on cancer survivorship, focusing specifically on three related topics particularly relevant to positive psychology: meaning, spirituality, and growth. The meaning making model (Park, Psychological Bulletin 136:257–301, 2010a; Park, Stress, coping, and meaning. In: Folkman S (ed.), Oxford handbook of stress, health, and coping (pp. 227–41), 2010b) serves as a framework for discussing the current state of research in meaning, spirituality, and growth within psycho-oncology. A brief overview of this meaning making model is thus presented before the literature regarding meaning in the context of cancer is reviewed. Spirituality, an important aspect of meaning in the lives of many survivors, follows. Stress-related growth, a product of meaning making that has recently received a great deal of attention within psycho-oncology research, is the third positive psychology topic discussed. The chapter concludes with a brief mention of clinical implications and future research directions. Importantly, because cancer survivorship spans a continuum from diagnosis through treatment and far beyond, and because survivors’ experiences of cancer change across this continuum, this chapter attends to the ways that issues of meaning, spirituality, and growth may differ across the survivorship continuum, and begins with an overview of this continuum.