- Access through your institution
Volume 42, Issue 4, August 2008, Pages 1031-1046
//doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2008.02.005Get rights and content
Man never made any material as resilient as the human spirit—Bern Williams When anticipating a possible negative event, previous research has shown that a person’s response to the occurrence of the anticipated negative event will depend in part on their trait resilience—the ability to adapt to life’s ever-changing landscape and recover quickly from stressors (Block & Kremen, 1996). There is a large corpus of evidence that shows that resilient people adapt more successfully in response to major life events (Moskowitz et al., 1996, Taylor et al., 2000) and traumatic experiences (Florian et al., 1995, Fredrickson et al., 2003). However, there is little research on how people recover when anticipated negative events do not happen, and whether this type of recovery also interacts with trait resilience. Although trait resilience encompasses the capacity to respond effectively to change, very few investigators have focused on the recovery from the anticipation of a negative event that then does not occur. It is, however, an important question to investigate. Part of being able to adapt to ever-changing circumstances is the ability to allocate emotional (as well as physical and intellectual) resources efficiently (Block & Kremen, 1996), by employing these limited resources (Muraven & Baumeister, 2000) only during demanding situations for which they are needed to cope. Coping with the anticipation of a possible negative event involves employing attentional resources to detect the threat (Ohman, Flykt, & Esteves, 2001), and physiological resources to prepare the body to respond to the threat (Paterson & Neufeld, 1987). Recovering successfully when that threat is unrealized may replenish these resources (Muraven & Baumeister, 2000), thus fueling coping efforts for the next demanding situation. We propose that trait resilience is associated with this ability to efficiently regulate emotional resources, thereby leading to quick and efficient recovery when anticipated negative events do not occur. In the rest of this introduction, we outline the logic and support for this proposition. Psychology researchers have long understood that trauma and major life stressors can lead to poor mental health, social functioning, and even psychopathology. Less well understood is the fact that most people experience trauma and major life stressors and do not develop poor mental health and psychopathology (Bonanno, 2004). In some circumstances, people even seem to thrive despite their difficult experiences (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004). For example, in a longitudinal study of Kauai children spanning five decades, researchers found that on the whole, children who grew up in poverty were more likely to have poor health and development outcomes. However, a striking finding was that within this subset of ‘at-risk’ children, a certain percentage never developed problems, and indeed seemed to thrive in their environments and became very successful (Werner and Smith, 1992, Werner and Smith, 2001). These individuals were dubbed ‘resilient’ because they were able to adapt to life’s stressors and thrive despite them (Block & Kremen, 1996). Research on resilience has blossomed in the last several years, in large part due to its relevance for mental health. Bonanno et al. (2002) found that those people who describe themselves as resilient before their loved one passed away were less likely to have enduring grief symptoms at and 4 and 18 months after the loved one’s death. They did experience cognitions consistent with grieving (e.g., thoughts of loss, rumination), but unlike nonresilient people, were able to continue functioning in their lives (Bonanno et al., 2002). Klohnen (1996) derived a self-report measure of resilience based on the work of Block and Block (1980), and found that it correlated highly with global adjustment, work and social adjustment, and psychological/physical health adjustment (Klohnen, 1996). In the current research, we treat resilience as a stable and enduring psychological trait. Our definition of trait resilience follows closely with that of Block and Kremen (1996) who describe a continuum of resilience, on which high ego-resilient people are characterized by their ability to exert appropriate and dynamic self-regulation, whereas low ego-resilient people (i.e., ego-brittle) tend to rigidly under or over self-regulate. This ability to dynamically and appropriately self-regulate allows high trait resilient people to adapt more quickly to changing circumstances. Conceptualizing resilience as a personality trait contrasts with an alternative view of resilience as an ordinary, universal component of personality (Bonanno, 2004, Bonanno et al., 2004, Bonanno et al., 2002, Masten, 2001). According to this line of thought, most people have within themselves the ability to be resilient, and that resilience itself is the result of normal adaptive functioning. However, while most individuals may exhibit resilient behavior at one time or another in their lives, treating resilience as a trait accounts for significant individual differences in the capacity to adapt in the face of trauma and stress given the same risks (e.g. low SES; Werner and Smith, 1992, Werner and Smith, 2001), or a similarly extreme negative life event (e.g. combat, Florian et al., 1995), as well as the fact that these individual differences may be present as early as birth (Caspi et al., 2003). Factors associated with resilience are associated with successful recovery from negative events. In a study examining the duration of people’s emotional response to a negative video, people high in extraversion and emotional stability (traits related to resilience; Fredrickson et al., 2003) showed quicker affective recovery than people low in these traits (Hemenover, 2003). In another study, those participants with greater asymmetry of left-brain activation at baseline, shown to be associated with well-being (Urry et al., 2004) and positive affectivity (Davidson, 1992), recovered more quickly to an aversive picture as measured by their attenuated startle blink magnitude at the offset of the picture (Jackson et al., 2003).
Recovering from negative experiences may be one avenue through which resilient people are able to actively maintain homeostasis in the face of adversity. Note that we define recovery broadly, as the return to homeostasis after any disrupting event, whether that event causes significant psychopathology or not. In this way, resilient people may experience normal levels of negative emotions and physiological distress in response to stressful situations (Tugade & Fredrickson, 2004), but for them to actively maintain homeostasis, they would need to recover from these normal stress responses. This notion is similar to the idea of allostasis—maintaining stability through change (McEwen, 2003). According to McEwen (2003), physiological systems such as glucocorticoids (e.g. cortisol; Sapolsky, Romero, & Munck, 2000), adrenaline, and cytokines can produce changes in physiology that are adaptive in the short term. Yet if these processes are not turned off, they can lead to allostatic load, the process by which tissue can become damaged through chronic activation of these hormones (McEwen, 1998). In this case, recovery and resilience are part and parcel of the same system. Namely, that part of resilience (maintaining stability through change) is the successful recovery from stressors. Doing so allows physiological and emotional systems to reset, which subsequently prevents allostatic load, tissue damage, and psychopathology.
Evidence is beginning to accrue to suggest that trait resilience is also associated with successful recovery when an anticipated negative event does not occur. In a study investigating physiological recovery from stress, people anticipated having to give a speech and were then informed that they did not have to give the speech. Those participants identified as high on trait resilience had faster cardiovascular recovery times (returns to baseline) compared to low trait resilient participants (Tugade & Fredrickson, 2004). In a neuroimaging study, high trait resilient participants exhibited less duration of activity (than low trait resilient participants) in the insula, a brain region associated with negative emotion, after anticipating a possible aversive picture, but viewing a neutral picture instead (Waugh, Wager, Fredrickson, Noll, & Taylor, 2008).
The goal of the current research was to extend these studies to investigate whether this physiological recovery translates into affective recovery. Affective recovery has been traditionally more elusive to measure than physiological recovery. Physiological changes are usually tracked continuously, allowing investigators to readily define a pre-event baseline and measure the system’s return to that baseline. Affect, on the other hand, is usually measured at discrete time points, and the measurement of affective recovery has followed suit (Hemenover, 2003, Jackson et al., 2003). In the current study, we attempted to mimic physiological measurements by having participants continuously rate their affect throughout all portions of the trial, a procedure previously shown to exhibit strong coherence with other aspects of emotional experience including physiology (Gottman and Levenson, 1985, Mauss et al., 2005).
In both of the previously mentioned studies, the anticipation of the pending negative experience played an important role in the differential recovery shown by low and high resilient participants. In the cardiovascular study, more positive emotions while anticipating having to give a speech mediated the influence of resilience on faster recovery (Tugade & Fredrickson, 2004). In the neuroimaging study, activation in the lateral orbitofrontal cortex, a brain region associated with negative expectations (Ursu & Carter, 2005), predicted the duration of the activation in the insula when the negative experience did not occur (Waugh et al., 2008). However, neither of these studies measured anticipatory affect directly; it was measured either retrospectively (Tugade & Fredrickson, 2004), or not at all (Waugh et al., 2008). Another goal of the current study was to go beyond these previous studies to measure anticipatory affect continuously, aided by the continuous affective rating measure.
Our first and main hypothesis was that people high in trait resilience would demonstrate more complete affective recovery when an anticipated negative event does not occur. To examine this hypothesis, participants were presented with one of three cues: the ‘safety’ cue indicated that a neutral picture would follow, the ‘threat’ cue indicated that either a neutral or aversive picture would follow, and the ‘aversive’ cue that indicated that an aversive picture would follow. Participants used a rating dial to continuously rate their affect from negative to positive throughout each portion of the task. This method allowed us to measure anticipation of and recovery from threat, as well as their interaction with trait resilience.
Our second hypothesis was that high trait resilient participants would more quickly learn to adapt to the demands of the task. More specifically, compared to low trait resilient participants, those high in trait resilience would show the affective recovery effect earlier in the task. To test this hypothesis, the task was comprised of two sessions separated by a 1-min rest period, which allowed for the analysis of learning effects across sessions. Quicker adaptation for high resilient people may present itself as one of two patterns in the current study. If the particular demands of this task are high enough that it takes all participants several trials to show any evidence of learning, then high and low trait resilient participants may appear similar in their recovery for the first session, and then diverge during the second session (with high trait resilient participants becoming better at recovering). An alternative possibility exists if the demands of this task are low enough that high trait resilient participants are able to quickly learn and adapt, thus exhibiting greater recovery during the first session; whereas it may take low trait resilient participants until the second session to ‘catch up’ and show similarly good recovery.
Trait resilience is often treated as a personality profile (Block & Kremen, 1996) related to high optimism, extraversion, openness to experience, and low neuroticism (Block and Kremen, 1996, Fredrickson et al., 2003, Klohnen, 1996). We also included these personality scales to assess whether any effects of this profile of trait resilience on recovery might be mediated by these more ‘core’ personality traits.
Of the 72 participants (45 females), 43 participants were recruited through flyers advertising a study on “personality and emotion”, and 29 participants were recruited through introductory psychology subject pool at a large Midwestern university. Participants recruited through the flyer completed a web-based prescreening in which they completed a measure of resilience, the ER89 (Block & Kremen, 1996; see description under Section 2.2). Participants recruited through the introductory psychology To analyze the effects of resilience in the following analyses, we formed two groups, high and low resilience, by performing a median split on the participants’ responses on the pre-task ER89 (Mdn = 3.00). This median split was necessary because we oversampled the tails of the distribution on the ER89, thus violating the assumption of normality required for regression analyses (K–S = .14, p < .01). As a result of equipment malfunctions, of the 72 participants recruited for the study, baseline rating The main finding from this study was that high5 trait resilient participants showed more complete affective recovery when presented with a neutral picture after anticipating a possible aversive picture. This finding replicates previous findings showing more efficient recovery for resilient
- S. Ursu et al.
- B.S. McEwen
- R.J. Larsen et al.
- J. Block et al.
- J. Block et al.
- G.A. Bonanno
- G.A. Bonanno et al.
- G.A. Bonanno et al.
- W.B. Cannon
- C.S. Carver
Despite the large body of research on Post-traumatic Stress Disorder symptoms (PTSS) caused by “part forever”, such as catastrophic events (e.g., earthquake), relatively few studies focus exclusively on PTSS caused by “living with separation” among the rural left-behind children in China. To investigate the relationship between resilience, student–teacher relationship, and parent–child separation-PTSS (PCS-PTSS), 271 rural left-behind children in Anhui province of China were recruited to participate in the current study. A longitudinal tracking study collected data on resilience, student–teacher relationship, and PCS-PTSS at two-time points. Multilevel linear regression analysis showed that age and resilience significantly negatively predict the PCS-PTSS marginally after controlling for gender, and the regression slope of age on PCS-PTSS was moderated considerably by the student–teacher relationship, which indicates the student–teacher relationship can weaken the predictive effect of age on PCS-PTSS. Additionally, the student–teacher relationship did not moderate the regression slope of resilience on parent–child separation PTSS. The present study mainly sheds light on the role of resilience and the student–teacher relationship to PCS-PTSS. The theoretical and practical implications, as well as the limitations of the current study, are discussed. The global crisis caused by the outbreak of a novel coronavirus and the associated disease (COVID-19) has changed working conditions due to social-distancing policies. Many workers started to use new technologies at work, including social media applications. In this longitudinal study, we investigated the potential stress effects of social media communication (SMC) at work. Based on our integrative theoretical model, we expected that SMC at work would burden some workers, but those who were accustomed to SMC at work would be better off when the crisis started. We collected a nationally representative sample of Finnish workers before (N = 1308) and during (N = 1081) the COVID-19 crisis. Outcome measures included technostress and work exhaustion. Multilevel linear mixed-effects regression models investigated formal and informal SMC at work. Covariates included cyberbullying at work, social media usage, personality, occupational status, and sociodemographic factors. Results showed that formal SMC increased and predicted higher technostress. However, technostress and work exhaustion decreased among workers already accustomed to using SMC at work before the crisis. The results indicate a disparity in workers’ resilience during remote work and highlight a need for organizational level support. This study aims to investigate the impact of social media, as a moderator variable, on farmer's resilience to climate change. According to the lack of investigation on the social impacts of social media, this study examines the direct and indirect effects of social media on the livelihood capitals and resilience of farmers to climate change. The purpose of the current study is categorized as applied research. Data collection was done through the survey method. Also, data analysis was done using a non-experimental and descriptive-correlation method. The statistical population consists of 36281 farmers who live in the drainage basin of the Ghezel Ozan River in Zanjan province. The sample size estimated 384 people through Krejcie and Morgan's table. Also, stratified random sampling was used by the appropriate assignment. The validity and reliability were evaluated through the convergent and discriminant validity method, and combined reliability, respectively. Data processing was done through structural equation modeling based on the partial least squares method. Results indicated that social media affects, directly and indirectly, the farmer's resilience through livelihood capitals. Also, livelihood capitals have a significant positive impact on farmer's resilience to climate change.
View all citing articles on Scopus
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a psychiatric condition which severely affects psychological well-being. Etiological explanations of BPD include the experience of early adversity, but how this impacts on risk-taking and impulsivity in relation to sexuality and mating has remained elusive. Here, we tested the hypothesis that people with BPD adopt a “fast” life history strategy which impacts their mate choice and sexual behavior. Sixty female patients with BPD and 45 controls were given 3 hypothetical vignettes depicting a “Predictably Safe”, an “Unpredictably Safe-Risky”, and a “Predictably Risky” life conditions, requiring the participant to put herself imaginatively into the described situation. Participants also completed questionnaires about their psychosexual development, depressiveness, and childhood experiences. Patients with BPD were significantly more likely to expect less parental investment from their hypothetical partners in the predictably safe condition, and to consent to sexual affairs at an earlier age than controls. Correlation analyses suggest that subjective depressiveness, childhood trauma, rearing style of patients' parents, and actual psychosexual development impacted on mate choice in the hypothetical scenarios. In addition, findings may also corroborate ideas of nonrandom mating in patients with BPD, which may be taken into consideration when interpersonal difficulties with romantic partners are dealt with in psychotherapy. Temperamental shyness emerges early in childhood and remains relatively stable throughout development and has been associated with high and low levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Studies examining the relation between shyness and cortisol have been limited because they have traditionally collected only one measure of cortisol on a single day in the laboratory, restricting the reliability and diurnal profile of the measure in the participant’s everyday environment. We collected 15 saliva samples across three separate days (i.e., upon waking, +60 min post-waking, +8 h post-waking, +10 h post-waking, and bedtime) in a sample of healthy young adults selected for high and low shyness in order to characterize a portion of the diurnal cortisol rhythm. Overall, shy individuals demonstrated relatively lower cortisol across the day and across multiple mornings than non-shy adults. Higher self-reported social anxiety across multiple measures was also related to lower total cortisol levels across all participants. The present study replicates and extends our previous findings of low salivary cortisol measured in the laboratory in shy adults to repeated measurement in their everyday environments. This contribution offers a review, comprehensive to date, of a 15-year research program on the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. Although centered on evidence that has emerged from Fredrickson's Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Laboratory (PEP Lab), it features key findings from other laboratories as well. It begins with a description of 10 representative positive emotions, alongside approaches for assessing them, both directly with the modified Differential Emotions Scale and indirectly through physiological and implicit measures. Next, it offers the seeds of the broaden-and-build theory, including work on the undo effect of positive emotions. It then reviews the state of the evidence for the twin hypotheses that stem from the broaden-and-build theory, the broaden hypothesis and the build hypothesis, including a focus on upward spiral dynamics. It touches next on new frontiers for the theory, including deeper investigations into the biological resources that positive emotions build as well as clinical and organizational applications. Finally, this contribution closes with a brief presentation of two offshoots from the broaden-and-build theory, namely, the upward spiral model of lifestyle change and work on love as positivity resonance between and among people. Both are targets of increasing work in the PEP Lab. Accumulating evidence indicates important roles of the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex and rostral limbic regions such as the anterior insula, in regulating stress-related affective responses and negative affect states in general. However, research is lacking in simultaneously assessing the inter-relations between trait and state affective responses to stress, and the functional connectivity between the subgenual anterior cingulate and anterior insula. This preliminary research involved matched healthy participants with high (N = 10) and low (N = 10) self-reported trait stress resilience, and assessed their affective and subgenual anterior cingulate-anterior insula resting-state functional connectivity patterns before and after a psychosocial stress task. We found that while the low-resilience group displayed higher trait negative affect and perceived greater task-related stress, only the high-resilience group showed increase of negative affect, along with greater decrease of left subgenual anterior cingulate-right anterior insula connectivity, following stress induction. Moreover, the functional connectivity change mediated group difference in affect change following stress task. We speculate that the contingent increase of negative affect, and the associated temporary decoupling of subgenual anterior cingulate-insula circuitry, may represent a normative and adaptive stress response underpinned by adaptive and dynamic interplay between the default mode and salience networks. Such findings, if consolidated, have important implications for promoting stress resilience and reducing risk for stress-related affective disorders. This paper will systematically analyze the concept of resilience using an integrated review of literature. The historical perspective, attributes, antecedents, and consequences of resilience will be reviewed. A theoretical and operational definition will be provided. The Walker and Avant method will be used to describe the cases. Finally, the use of concept map will capture the relationships among the attributes, antecedents, consequences, and empirical indicators through clustering and chaining. The purpose of this paper is to determine the phenotypic relationships, and etiologic underpinnings, of cognitive/psychological traits with psychiatric resilience. Resilience was defined as the difference between the twins' total score on a broad measure of internalizing symptoms and their predicted score based on their cumulative exposure to stressful life events (SLEs). Cholesky decompositions were performed in a large twin sample (n = 7500 individuals) to quantify the overlap in genetic and environmental factors between resilience and six traits (neuroticism, optimism, self-esteem, mastery, interpersonal dependency, altruism) in bivariate analyses, and in a multivariate model. On a phenotypic level, each trait accounted for variance in resilience in univariate analyses. In the multivariate regression neuroticism accounted for the majority of the variance and attenuated the relationships between the other traits and resilience. The genetic factors that influence the traits account for between 7 and 60% of the heritability of resilience. In the multivariate genetic model neuroticism accounted for all of the genetic covariance between the traits and resilience; 40% of the genetic influence on resilience was independent. Neuroticism evidenced the largest phenotypic and genetic relationship with resilience, and accounted for nearly all of the phenotypic and genetic variance between resilience and the other traits.