Another of our goals is to better understand the mechanisms of long-term psychological health in cardiac arrest survivors and whether there are interventions we can use to effect positive psychological outcomes. For those patients who experience an enhanced sense of altruism and compassion after surviving cardiac arrest, they clearly have a higher quality of life than those who experience outcomes such as anxiety, depression, or PTSD.

Our aim is to determine whether it’s possible to use positive psychology to intervene in patients who experience negative psychological outcomes by using proven scientific and medical methods. This idea has not been explored before and has enormous potential to transform the lives of the 15 to 50 percent of survivors who suffer from negative psychological conditions.

We are currently developing innovative studies to test the plausibility of changing patients’ psychological wellbeing after cardiac arrest using positive psychology.