Cynthia Pury, Professor of Psychology at Clemson, trained as a clinical psychologist specialising in anxiety disorders. Pury’s major research interests involve courage, virtue, and positive psychology; her research began in the area of cognition and fear, specifically threat appraisals. She is Associate Editor of The Journal of Positive Psychology, editor of The Psychology of Courage, and Co-organiser of the 2007 Courage Summit.
Zan Boag: There aren’t many people who have delved into ‘courage’, at least not recently.
Cynthia Pury: There’s really not. There’s just a few of us. For a little while there, I was joking that when I would go to a psychology-type conference, if I would be on a panel, we would have sort of our pre-panel get together, but it really turned into the ‘courage researcher support group’. Then we’d all complain about how we weren’t getting funding – which really hasn’t changed – and how people would weirdly get offended if you called something ‘courageous’ that they disagreed with, which is sort of how I got interested in courage in the first place. And why is it that people are offended by this?
But I think a big part of it, and this may overlap with philosophy, is that in order to call something courageous, you have to agree with the goal that the person’s pursuing, or at least agree that it could be a worthwhile goal for someone. You also have to understand what the risk is. I think that where people have gotten offended or feel weird about it, it’s the case that it’s a mismatch for them in some way: that they don’t see the action as risky, or they don’t see the goal it is taken for as valuable.
As with any term, there’s no one way of defining courage – it depends on the circumstances. In Human Strengths, Courageous Actions, and General and Personal Courage, you and Robin Kowalski wrote about Peterson and Seligman’s concept of courage, which you sum up as “to act courageously, one must ignore danger. That’s bravery. And continue to act: persistence; follow one’s convictions, which is integrity; and act with energy and enthusiasm, which is vitality.”
Early on in positive psychology, Peterson and Seligman tried to write what they considered to be the anti-DSM, and they edited a volume called. It ’s meant
