PERSONALITY PROCESSES AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES Self-Enhancement Among High-Exposure Survivors of the September 11th Terrorist Attack: Resilience or Social Maladjustment? George A. Bonanno, Courtney Rennicke, and Sharon Dekel Teachers College, Columbia University The authors examined self-enhancing bias as a predictor of adjustment among individuals in or near the World Trade Center during the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Resilience was defined from categorical and continuous analyses of both participant self-report and friend and relative ratings of adjustment. Self-enhancement was associated with a resilient outcome, ratings of better adjustment prior to September 11th, greater positive affect, and reduced perceptions of social constraints. Additional analyses indicated that self-enhancers’ reduced symptom levels were fully mediated by their low perceived social constraints. However, consistent with previous evidence suggesting a social cost to self-enhancement, at 18 months post–September 11th, self-enhancers’ friends and relatives also rated them as decreasing in social adjustment and as being less honest. Keywords: self-enhancement, trauma, resilience, terrorism, PTSD The attack on the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York City on September 11, 2001, was the largest and most significant act of terrorism in U.S. history: An estimated 2,800 people lost their lives and countless others were injured, displaced, or incurred financial losses. The attack has received unprecedented attention, both in the media and in the growing number of empirical studies that have begun to appear in psychological, psychiatric, and medical jour- nals. Much of the preliminary research on the September 11th attack has focused on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD, Amer- ican Psychiatric Association, 2000) or on the related question of what might constitute sufficient exposure to warrant the disorder (e.g., Silver, Holman, McIntosh, Poulin, & Gil-Rivas, 2002). By contrast, relatively little research has focused on the opposite extreme: individuals who were directly physically exposed to the attacks but nonetheless evidenced psychological resilience. We conducted the current study to address this issue. Specifically, we recruited a sample of individuals who were in or very near the WTC at the time of the September 11th attack and then operation- ally defined various trajectories of outcome, including psycholog- ical resilience. We were particularly interested in a subset of high-exposure individuals who characteristically use unrealistic, self-serving biases (i.e., trait self-enhancement) and in whether these individuals might show genuine resilience or other less clearly adaptive outcomes (e.g., delayed reactions, social maladjustment). Resilience in the Face of Terrorist Attack On the basis of epidemiological studies, researchers have esti- mated that a majority of U.S. civilians are exposed to at least one potentially traumatic event (PTE) during the course of their lives. Although trauma reactions vary in relation to the type, duration, and severity of exposure, typically only 5%–10% of exposed individuals will meet diagnostic criteria for PTSD (Ozer, Best, Lipsey, & Weiss, 2003). Consistent with these estimates, a population-based survey of Manhattan residents estimated that 7.5% would have met criteria for PTSD at some point in the first 6 months after the September 11th attack and that the probable PTSD rate would have been 12.3% among individuals living south of 14th Street, closer to the WTC towers (Galea et al., 2002). What about high-exposure individuals who may have exhibited resilience? Our approach to this question was guided by three conceptual distinctions underscored in recent reviews of the loss and trauma literature (Bonanno, 2004, in press). First, resilience represents an outcome trajectory distinct from the type of re- sponses typically associated with recovery from trauma (Bonanno, 2004). There have been few attempts in the trauma literature to George A. Bonanno, Courtney Rennicke, and Sharon Dekel, Depart- ment of Counseling and Clinical Psychology, Teachers College, Columbia University. The research described in this article was supported by Grants BCS- 0202772 and BCS-0337643 from the National Science Foundation to George A. Bonanno. We are grateful to the participants of this study for allowing us to question them so freely regarding their experiences during the September 11th terrorist attacks. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to George A. Bonanno, Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology, 525 West 120th Street, Teachers College, Box 218, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027. E-mail: gab38@columbia.edu Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Copyright 2005 by the American Psychological Association 2005, Vol. 88, No. 6, 984 –998 0022-3514/05/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.88.6.984 984