Psychological resilience
Psychological resilience, or mental resilience, is the ability to cope mentally and emotionally with a crisis, or to return to pre-crisis status quickly.
The term was popularized in the 1970s and 1980s by psychologist Emmy Werner as she conducted a forty-year-long study of a cohort of Hawaiian children who came from low socioeconomic status backgrounds.
Numerous factors influence a person's level of resilience. Internal factors include personal characteristics such as self-esteem, self-regulation, and a positive outlook on life. External factors include social support systems, including relationships with family, friends, and community, as well as access to resources and opportunities.
People can leverage psychological interventions and other strategies to enhance their resilience and better cope with adversity. These include cognitive-behavioral techniques, mindfulness practices, building psychosocial factors, fostering positive emotions, and promoting self-compassion.
Overview
A resilient person uses "mental processes and behaviors in promoting personal assets and protecting self from the potential negative effects of stressors". Psychological resilience is an adaptation in a person's psychological traits and experiences that allows them to regain or remain in a healthy mental state during crises/chaos without long-term negative consequences.It is difficult to measure and test this psychological construct because resilience can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Most psychological paradigms have their own perspective of what resilience looks like, where it comes from, and how it can be developed. There are numerous definitions of psychological resilience, most of which center around two concepts: adversity and positive adaptation. Positive emotions, social support, and hardiness can influence a person to become more resilient.
A psychologically resilient person can resist adverse mental conditions that are often associated with unfavorable life circumstances. This differs from psychological recovery which is associated with returning to those mental conditions that preceded a traumatic experience or personal loss.
Research on psychological resilience has shown that it plays a crucial role in promoting mental health and well-being. Resilient people are better equipped to navigate life's challenges, maintain positive emotions, and recover from setbacks. They demonstrate higher levels of self-efficacy, optimism, and problem-solving skills, which contribute to their ability to adapt and thrive in adverse situations.
Resilience is a "positive adaptation" after a stressful or adverse situation. When a person is "bombarded by daily stress, it disrupts their internal and external sense of balance, presenting challenges as well as opportunities." The routine stressors of daily life can have positive impacts which promote resilience. Some psychologists believe that it is not stress itself that promotes resilience but rather the person's perception of their stress and of their level of control. Stress allows people to practice resilience over time, different levels of stress vary among different individuals and the reason for that being is unknown. However, it is known that some people can handle stress better than others.
Stress can be experienced in a person's life course at times of difficult life transitions, involving developmental and social change; traumatic life events, including grief and loss; and environmental pressures, encompassing poverty and community violence.
Resilience is the integrated adaptation of physical, mental, and spiritual aspects to circumstances, and a coherent sense of self that is able to maintain normative developmental tasks that occur at various stages of life. The Children's Institute of the University of Rochester explains that "resilience research is focused on studying those who engage in life with hope and humor despite devastating losses".
Resilience is not only about overcoming a deeply stressful situation, but also coming out of such a situation with "competent functioning". Resiliency allows a person to rebound from adversity as a strengthened and more resourceful person.
Some characteristics associated with psychological resilience include: an easy temperament, good self-esteem, planning skills, and a supportive environment inside and outside of the family.
When an event is appraised as comprehensible, manageable, and somehow meaningful a resilient response is more likely.
Process
Psychological resilience is commonly understood as a process. It can also be characterized as a tool a person develops over time, or as a personal trait of the person. Most research shows resilience as the result of people being able to interact with their environments and participate in processes that either promote well-being or protect them against the overwhelming influence of relative risk. This research supports the model in which psychological resilience is seen as a process rather than a trait—something to develop or pursue, rather than a static endowment or endpoint.When people are faced with an adverse condition, there are three ways in which they may approach the situation.
- respond with anger or aggression
- become overwhelmed and shut down
- feel the emotion about the situation and appropriately handle the emotion
Resilience can be viewed as a developmental process, or as indicated by a response process. In the latter approach, the effects of an event or stressor on a situationally relevant indicator variable are studied, distinguishing immediate responses, dynamic responses, and recovery patterns. In response to a stressor, more-resilient people show some increase in stress. The speed with which this stress response returns to pre-stressor levels is also indicative of a person's resilience.
Biological models
From a scientific standpoint, resilience's contested definition is multifaceted in relation to genetics, revealing a complex link between biological mechanisms and resilience:"Resilience, conceptualized as a positive bio-psychological adaptation, has proven to be a useful theoretical context for understanding variables for predicting long-term health and well-being".
Three notable bases for resilience—self-confidence, self-esteem and self-concept—each have roots in a different nervous system—respectively, the somatic nervous system, the autonomic nervous system, and the central nervous system.
Research indicates that, like trauma, resilience is influenced by epigenetic modifications. Increased DNA methylation of the growth factor GDNF in certain brain regions promotes stress resilience, as do molecular adaptations of the blood–brain barrier.
The two neurotransmitters primarily responsible for stress buffering within the brain are dopamine and endogenous opioids, as evidenced by research showing that dopamine and opioid antagonists increased stress response in both humans and animals. Primary and secondary rewards reduce negative reactivity. Primary rewards are stimuli that are attributed to basic needs, such as water, food, and physical well-being. On the other hand, secondary rewards are accomplished by experiences or social interactions of stress in the brain in both humans and animals. The relationship between social support and stress resilience is thought to be mediated by the oxytocin system's impact on the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.
Alongside such neurotransmitters, stress-induced alterations in brain structures, such as the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus have been linked to mental health issues like depression and anxiety. The increased activation of the medial prefrontal cortex and glutamatergic circuits has emerged as a potential factor in enhancing resilience as "environmental enrichment... increases the complexity of... pyramidal neurons in hippocampus and PFC, suggesting... a shared feature of resilience under these two distinct condition."
Sport models
Within the athletic context, resilience is conceptualized not only as an inherent trait but also as a dynamic process shaped by training, motivation and environmental conditions. Psychological models in sports commonly distinguished between trait resilience — the relatively stable disposition toward perseverance and historically conceptualized as hardiness — and process resilience, which refers to skill that allows adaptive responses to adversity over time. These models align with performance related outcomes such as stress recovery and competitive consistency.History
The first research on resilience was published in 1973. The study used epidemiology—the study of disease prevalence—to uncover the risks and the protective factors that now help define resilience. A year later, the same group of researchers created tools to look at systems that support development of resilience.Emmy Werner was one of the early scientists to use the term resilience. She studied a cohort of children from Kauai, Hawaii. Kauai was quite poor and many of the children in the study grew up with alcoholic or mentally ill parents. Many of the parents were also out of work. Werner noted that of the children who grew up in these detrimental situations, two-thirds exhibited destructive behaviors in their later-teen years, such as chronic unemployment, substance abuse, and out-of-wedlock births. However, one-third of these youths did not exhibit destructive behaviors. Werner called the latter group resilient. Thus, resilient children and their families were those who, by definition, demonstrated traits that allowed them to be more successful than non-resilient children and families.
Resilience also emerged as a major theoretical and research topic in the 1980s in studies of children with mothers diagnosed with schizophrenia. A 1989 study showed that children with a schizophrenic parent may not obtain an appropriate level of comforting caregiving—compared to children with healthy parents—and that such situations often had a detrimental impact on children's development. On the other hand, some children of ill parents thrived and were competent in academic achievement, which led researchers to make efforts to understand such responses to adversity.
Since the onset of the research on resilience, researchers have been devoted to discovering protective factors that explain people's adaptation to adverse conditions, such as maltreatment, catastrophic life events, or urban poverty. Researchers endeavor to uncover how some factors may contribute to positive outcomes.