Wednesday, 16 May 2012
Saturday, 5 May 2012
Tuesday, 10 April 2012
PSYCHOLOGICAL RESILIENCE
Psychological Resilience
Resilience in psychology refers to the idea of an individual's tendency to cope with stress and adversity. This coping may result in the individual
“bouncing back” to a previous state of normal functioning, or using the
experience of exposure to adversity to produce a “steeling effect” and function
better than expected (much like an inoculation gives one the capacity to cope
well with future exposure to disease).[1]
Resilience is most commonly understood as a process, and not a trait of an
individual.[2]
Recently there has also been
evidence that resilience can indicate a capacity to resist a sharp decline in
functioning even though a person temporarily appears to get worse.[3][4]
A child, for example, may do poorly during critical life transitions (like
entering junior high) but experience problems that are less severe than would
be expected given the many risks the child faces.[clarification
needed]
There is also controversy about the
indicators of good psychological and social development when resilience is
studied across different cultures and contexts.[5][6][7]
The American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Resilience and Strength
in Black Children and Adolescents,[8]
for example, notes that there may be special skills that these young people and
families have that help them cope, including the ability to resist racial
prejudice. Researchers of indigenous health have shown the impact of culture,
history, community values, and geographical settings on resilience in
indigenous communities.[9]
People who cope may also show “hidden resilience”[10]
when they don’t conform with society’s expectations for how someone is supposed
to behave (in some contexts, aggression may be required to cope, or less
emotional engagement may be protective in situations of abuse).[11]
In all these instances, resilience
is best understood as a process. It is often mistakenly assumed to be a trait
of the individual, an idea more typically referred to as “resiliency”.[12]
Most research now shows that resilience is the result of individuals being able
to interact with their environments and the processes that either promote
well-being or protect them against the overwhelming influence of risk factors.[13]
These processes can be individual coping strategies, or may be helped along by
good families, schools, communities, and social policies that make resilience
more likely to occur.[14]
In this sense "resilience" occurs when there are cumulative
"protective factors". These factors are likely to play a more and
more important role the greater the individual’s exposure to cumulative
"risk factors". The phrase "risk and resilience"' in this
area of study is quite common.
Commonly used terms, which are
closely related within psychology, are "psychological resilience",
"emotional resilience", "hardiness", "resourcefulness", and "mental
toughness". The earlier focus on individual capacity which Anthony[15]
described as the “invulnerable child” has evolved into a more multilevel
ecological perspective that builds on theory developed by Uri Bronfenbrenner
(1979), and more recently discussed in the work of Michael Ungar (2004, 2008),
Ann Masten (2001), and Michael Rutter (1987, 2008). The focus in research has shifted
from "protective factors" toward protective "processes";
trying to understand how different factors are involved in both promoting
well-being and protecting against risk.
Resilience is a dynamic process
whereby individuals exhibit positive behavioral adaptation
when they encounter significant adversity,[16]
trauma,[17]
tragedy, threats, or even
significant sources of stress.[18]
It is different from strengths or developmental assets which are a
characteristic of an entire population, regardless of the level of adversity
they face. Under adversity, assets function differently (a good school, or
parental monitoring, for example, have a great deal more influence in the life
of a child from a poorly resourced background than one from a wealthy home with
other options for support, recreation, and self-esteem).[19]
Resilience is a two-dimensional
construct concerning the exposure of adversity and the positive adjustment
outcomes of that adversity.[20]
This two-dimensional construct implies two judgments: one about a
"positive adaptation" and the other about the significance of risk
(or adversity).[21]
One point of view about adversity could define it as any risks associated with negative life conditions that are
statistically related to adjustment difficulties, such as poverty, children of
mothers with schizophrenia, or experiences of disasters. Positive adaptation, on the
other hand, is considered in a demonstration of manifested behaviour on social
competence or success at meeting any particular tasks at a specific life stage,
such as the absence of psychiatric
distress after the September 11th terrorism attacks on the United States.[20]
Ungar[22]
argues that this standard definition of resilience could be problematic because
it does not adequately account for cultural and contextual differences in how
people in other systems express resilience. Through collaborative mixed methods
research in eleven countries, Ungar and his colleagues at the Resilience
Research Centre have shown that cultural and contextual factors exert a great
deal of influence on the factors that affect resilience among a population of
youth-at-risk.[23]
Resilience has been shown to be more
than just the capacity of individuals to cope well under adversity.[citation
needed] Resilience is better understood as the opportunity and
capacity of individuals to navigate their way to psychological, social,
cultural, and physical resources that may sustain their well-being, and their
opportunity and capacity individually and collectively to negotiate for these
resources to be provided and experienced in culturally meaningful ways.[24]
Studies of demobilized child soldiers, high school drop-outs, urban poor,
immigrant youth, and other populations at risk are showing these patterns.[25]
Among adults, these same themes emerge, as detailed in the work of Zautra, Hall
and Murray (2010).[13]
Garmezy (1973) published the first
research findings on resilience. He used epidemiology, which is the study of
who gets ill, who doesn't, and why, to uncover the risks and the protective
factors that now help define resilience.[26]
Garmezy and Streitman (1974) then created tools to look at systems that support
development of resilience.[27]
Emmy Werner (1982) was one of the early scientists to use the term
resilience in the 1970s. 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.[28]
Werner noted that of the children who grew up in these very bad situations,
two-thirds exhibited destructive behaviors in their later teen years, such as
chronic unemployment, substance abuse, and out-of-wedlock births
(in case of teenage girls). However one-third of these youngsters did not
exhibit destructive behaviours. Werner called the latter group 'resilient'.[29]
Resilient children and their families had traits that made them different from
non-resilient children and families.
Resilience emerged as a major
theoretical and research topic from the studies of children of schizophrenic
mothers in the 1980s.[30]
In Masten’s (1989) study,[31]
the results showed that children with a schizophrenic
parent may not obtain comforting caregiving compared to children with healthy
parents, and such situations had an impact on children’s development. However,
some children of ill parents thrived well and were competent in academic
achievement, and therefore led researchers to make efforts to understand such
responses to adversity.
In the onset of the research on
resilience, researchers have been devoted to discovering the protective factors
that explain people’s adaptation to adverse conditions, such as maltreatment,[32]
catastrophic life events,[33]
or urban poverty.[34]
The focus of empirical work then has been shifted to understand the underlying
protective processes. Researchers endeavor to uncover how some factors (e.g.
family) may contribute to positive outcomes.[34]
Resilience can be described by
viewing:
- good outcomes regardless of high-risk status,
- constant competence under stress,
- recovery from trauma,[30] and
- using challenges for growth that makes future hardships more tolerable.
Resilience describes people who are
expected to adapt successfully even though they experience risk factors that
‘stack the odds’ against them experiencing good development. Risk factors are
related to poor or negative outcomes. For example, poverty, low socioeconomic
status, and mothers with schizophrenia
are coupled with lower academic achievement and more emotional
or behavioral problems. Risk factors may be cumulative, carrying additive and
exponential risks when they co-occur.[30]
When these risk factors happen, according to a study conducted on children,[35]
resilient children are capable of resulting in no behavioural problems and
developing well. Additionally, they are more active and socially responsive.
These positive outcomes are attributed to some protective factors, such as good
parenting or positive school experiences.
Resilience is also treated as an
effective coping mechanism when people are under stress, such as divorce. In this
context, resilience is relevant with sustained competence exhibited by individuals
who experience challenging conditions. Most research built on this perspective
focuses on the children’s response to parents’ divorce in terms of gender. Boys
show more conduct problems than do girls; girls obtain more support from
mothers and are less exposed to family conflict than boys. Although divorce may
have some negative impacts on children’s development, it may help children in
single households to become more responsible than those in dual-parents
households because of helping with chores. Some protective factors attributing
to resilient children in single-family, for example, are adults caring for
children during or after major stressors (e.g., divorce), or self-efficacy
for motivating endeavor at adaptation.
Finally, resilience can be viewed as
the phenomenon of recovery from a prolonged or severe adversity, or from an
immediate danger or stress.[36][37]
In this case, resilience is not related to vulnerability.
People who experience acute trauma, for example, may show extreme anxiety,
sleep problems, and intrusive thoughts. Over time, these symptoms decrease and
recovery is likely. This realm of research shows that age and the supportive
qualities of the family influence the condition of recovery. The Buffalo Creek dam disaster, for example, had longer effects on older children than on
younger.[38]
Additionally, children with supportive families show fewer symptoms (e.g.,
dreams of personal death) than children from troubled families, as revealed by
a study on victims of the 1976 Chowchilla bus kidnapping.[39]
Several factors are found to modify
the negative effects of adverse life situations. Many studies show that the
primary factor is to have relationships that provide care and support, create
love and trust, and offer encouragement, both within and outside the family.
Additional factors are also associated with resilience, like the capacity to
make realistic plans, having self-confidence
and a positive self image, developing communications
skills, and the capacity to manage strong
feelings and impulses.[40]
Another protective factor is related
to moderating the negative effects of environmental hazards or a stressful
situation in order to direct vulnerable individuals to optimistic paths, such
as external social support. More specifically, Werner (1995)[41]
distinguished three contexts for protective factors: (1) personal attributes,
including outgoing, bright, and positive self-concepts;
(2) the family, such as having close bonds with at least one family member or
an emotionally stable parent; and (3) the community, like receiving support or
counsel from peers.
Besides the above distinction on
resilience, research has also been devoted to discovering the individual
differences in resilience. Self-esteem,
ego-control, and ego-resiliency are related to behavioral adaptation.[42]
For example, maltreated children who feel good about themselves may process
risk situations differently by attributing different reasons to the
environments they experience and, thereby, avoid producing negative internalized
self-perceptions. Ego-control is "the threshold or operating
characteristics of an individual with regard to the expression or
containment" (Block & Block, 1980, p. 43) of their impulses,
feelings, and desires. Ego-resilience refers to “dynamic capacity,……to modify
his or her model level of ego-control, in either direction, as a function of
the demand characteristics of the environmental context" (Block &
Block, 1980, p. 48).[43]
Maltreated children, who experienced
some risk factors (e.g., single parenting, limited maternal education, or
family unemployment), showed lower ego-resilience and intelligence than
nonmaltreated children (Cicchetti et al., 1993). Furthermore, maltreated
children are more likely than nonmaltreated children to demonstrate
disruptive-aggressive, withdraw, and internalized behavior problems (Cicchetti
et al., 1993). Finally, ego-resiliency, and positive self-esteem
were predictors of competent adaptation in the maltreated children (Cicchetti
et al., 1993).
Demographic information (e.g.,
gender) and resources (e.g., social support) are also used to predict
resilience. Examining people's adaptation after the 9/11 attacks (Bonanno,
Galea Bucciarelli, & Vlahov, 2007)[44]
showed women were associated with less likelihood of resilience than men. Also,
individuals who were less involved in affinity groups and organisations showed
less resilience. King, King, Fairbank, Keane, and Adams (1998) studied
resilience in Vietnam War veterans and found social support to be a major
factor contributing to resilience.[45]
Schnurr, Lunney, and Sengupta (2004)
found that several protective factors among those were the following factors
protecting against the development of PTSD:
- Japanese-American ethnicity, high school degree or college education, older age at entry to war, higher socioeconomic status, and a more positive paternal relationship as premilitary factors
- Social support at homecoming and current social support as postmilitary factors[46]
and the following factors protecting
among the maintenance of PTSD
- Native Hawaiian or Japanese-American ethnicity and college education as premilitary factors
- Current social support as postmilitary factor[46]
A number of other factors that
promote resilience have been identified:
- The ability to cope with stress effectively and in a healthy manner
- Having good problem-solving skills
- Seeking help
- Holding the belief that there is something one can do to manage your feelings and cope
- Having social support
- Being connected with others, such as family or friends
- Self-disclosure of the trauma to loved ones
- Spirituality
- Having an identity as a survivor as opposed to a victim
- Helping others
- Finding positive meaning in the trauma[47]
Certain aspects of
religions/spirituality may, hypothetically, promote or hinder certain
psychological virtues that increase resiliance. Research has not established
connection between spirituality and resilience. According to the 4th edition of
Psychology of Religion by Hood, et al., the "study of positive psychology
is a relatively new development...there has not yet been much direct empirical
research looking specifically at the association of religion and ordinary
strengths and virtues".[48]
In a review of the literature on the relationship between
religiosity/spirituality and PTSD, amongst the significant findings, about half
of the studies showed a positive relationship and half showed a negative
relationship between measures of religiosity/spirituality and resilience.[49]
The United States Army has received criticism for promoting spirituality in its
new [Comprehensive Soldier Fitness] program as a way prevent PTSD, due to the
lack of conclusive supporting data.
An emerging field in the study of
resilience is the neurobiological basis of resilience to stress. For example,
neuropeptide Y (NPY) and 5-Dehydroepiandrosterone (5-DHEA) are thought to limit
the stress response by reducing sympathetic nervous system activation and
protecting the brain from the potentially harmful effects of chronically
elevated cortisol levels respectively.[50]
In addition, 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.[51]
The American
Psychological Association suggests
"10 Ways to Build Resilience", which are: (1) maintaining good relationships with close family members, friends and others; (2) to avoid
seeing crises or stressful events as unbearable problems; (3) to accept circumstances
that cannot be changed; (4) to develop realistic goals and move towards them; (5) to take decisive actions in
adverse situations; (6) to look for opportunities of self-discovery after a
struggle with loss; (7) developing self-confidence; (8) to keep a long-term perspective and consider the stressful event in a broader context; (9)
to maintain a hopeful outlook, expecting good things and visualizing
what is wished; (10) to take care of one's mind and body, exercising
regularly, paying attention to one's own needs and feelings and engaging in relaxing activities
that one enjoys.[52]
Learning from the past[53]
and maintaining flexibility and balance in life[54]
are also cited.
The Young Foundation's
work on wellbeing in the UK emphasises 'subjective wellbeing', what people feel
about the quality of their life. A key element of this is 'resilience', how people bounce
back from adversity. Their work includes:
- Working with Lord Richard Layard from the London School of Economics, the IDeA and three leading local authorities, Hertfordshire, Manchester and South Tyneside, as the lead partner in the Local Wellbeing Project to look at the different ways in which local government and its local partners can promote wellbeing. The State of Happiness, the final Local Wellbeing Project report, brings together three years of groundbreaking work in the three partner local authority areas as well as other national and international developments in this field.
- Emotional Resilience for Gangs - commissioned by Harrow Metropolitan Police to develop and pilot an emotional resilience programme targeting 14-19 year olds who are offending or at risk of offending, and are associated with gang activity. The Young Foundation is working in collaboration with Dr Ilona Boniwell, one of Europe's leading positive psychologists, to develop this new programme, training professionals in Harrow from Youth Services, the Anti-social Behaviour Unit, Safer Neighbourhoods Team and the Wealdstone Anti-social Behaviour Partnership. Training of professionals and the delivery of the pilot will take place in early 2011 with a report to follow.[55]
Head Start was shown to promote resilience.[56]
So was the Big
Brothers Big Sisters Programme, the Abecedarian
Early Intervention Project,[57][58]
and social programs for youth with emotional or behavioral difficulties[59]
See also: Compensatory Education
This section's tone
or style may not reflect the formal tone used on Wikipedia. Specific concerns may be found on the talk
page. See Wikipedia's guide
to writing better articles
for suggestions. (June 2009)
|
Resilience in children refers to
individuals who are doing better than expected, given a history that includes
risk or adverse experience. Simply put, resilience requires two conditions to
be met: (1) the child must have experienced some sort of risk or adversity that
has been linked with poor outcomes, and (2) the child is generally doing okay
despite being exposed to that risk or adversity; they are not showing that poor
outcome.[60]
One view is that resilience is a
description of a group of children. It is not a trait or something that some
children 'just have.' There is no such thing as an 'invulnerable child' who can
overcome any obstacle that life throws at her (although some children may seem
that way!). Resilience is not a rare and magical quality. In fact, it is quite
common.[61]
Resilience is the product of a large number of developmental processes over
time that has allowed children who experience some sort of risk to continue to
develop competently (while other children have not).[62]
Research on 'protective factors' has helped developmental scientists to
understand what matters most for resilient children. Protective factors are
characteristics of children or situations that particularly help children in
the context of risk. There are many different protective factors that are
important for resilient children. Two that have emerged time and again in
studies of resilient children are good cognitive functioning (like cognitive
self-regulation and IQ) and positive relationships (especially with competent
adults, like parents).[63]
Children who have protective factors in their lives tend to do better in some
risky contexts when compared to children without protective factors in the same
contexts. However, this is not a justification to expose any child to risk.
Children do better when not exposed to high levels of risk or adversity.
A separate view is that certain
children survive extremely high risk environments, such as a schizophrenic
parent, through personal invulnerability—a stubborn resistance to being drawn
into a maelstrom of mental illness due to a profound attachment to reality:
“…First, at a conference on risk research held in Puerto
Rico in 1980, Manfred Bleuler presented a striking clinical vignette. In
describing Vreni, a remarkably “sane” offspring of a severely disturbed,
chronic schizophrenic mother, Blueler (1980) commented on her need for mastery
over an otherwise intolerable situation. This was a young woman who clearly was
not a “superkid”, but who managed to cope well, to care for her ill mother and
her siblings, and later to marry and have children of her own. What comes
across in Bleuler’s description, however, is the competent offspring’s ability
to see the disorder or the circumstances as outside of herself, to seek out
ways of understanding her parent’s problems, and to conceptualize them within a
manageable, reality-focused framework.
“Secondly, Anthony (1974) commented in a similar fashion in
reviewing the attributes of the well-functioning offspring of disturbed parents
in his sample. He stated that these offspring ‘had a stubborn resistance to
the process of being engulfed by the illness; a curiosity in studying the
etiology, diagnosis, symptoms and treatment of the illness…; [and] a capacity
to develop an objective, realistic, somewhat distant and yet distinctly
compassionate approach to the parental illness, neither retreating from it nor
being intimidated by it’ (p. 40).
“Finally, Space and Cromwell (1978) have described what they
call the ‘unique personal construct structure’ of the healthy offspring of a
schizophrenic parent. In their view, such an individual does not accept the
conceptual structure of the psychotic parent, but instead formulates a
conceptual structure based on an internal locus of control.
“All three of these sources of data uniformly point to the
capacity of the child to objectify the disturbed parent and to view her as
outside the self. This view also characterizes the child’s continuing desire to
master an understanding of the parent’s pathology – in essence, to deal with
the aberrant behavior or circumstances through learning and other more objective
and reality-based approaches…”
--The Invulnerable Child', Elwyn James Anthony, p. 226
When it comes to children, there are
still many scientific debates with respect to resilience. One debate involves
differing opinions about what constitutes 'doing okay.' There is considerable
agreement that child competence can be defined and measured in a way that can
indicate whether or not the child is doing well. Called 'age-salient
developmental tasks,' these are things that are generally expected of children
of a certain age, in a certain culture, of a certain time or point in history.[64]
Developmental tasks can span all areas or domains of a person's life. For
example, in many cultures (but certainly not all) 14 month old children are
expected to be able to show the beginnings of spoken language, early motor
coordination that allows them to start walking, able to form an attachment
relationship with a primary caregiver, etc. These tasks certainly change with
age; generally children are expected to show increasingly sophisticated
cognitive and social abilities as they grow older: 5 year olds are expected to
show a higher degree of independence and self-regulation skills (for example),
compared to a 2 year old. Resilient children can be thought of as those who
show competence in age-salient developmental tasks even though they have
experienced some risk or adversity that threatened that competence. Others have
focused on different criteria for 'doing okay', such as the absence of mental
health problems like depression or conduct problems. Still others have focused
on happiness or the experience of positive emotions.
Transgender youth experience a
wide-range of abuse and lack of understanding from the people in their
environment and are better off with a high resilience to deal with their lives.
A study was done looking at 55 transgender youths studying their sense of personal
mastery, perceived social support, emotion-oriented coping and self-esteem. It
was seen that around 50% of the variation in the resilience aspects accounted
for the problematic issues of the teens. This means that transgender youths
with lower resilience were more prone to mental health issues, including
depression and trauma symptoms. Emotion-oriented coping was a strong aspect of
resilience in determining how depressed the individuals were. [65]
Resilient children as described by
Garmezy[66]
as working and playing well and holding high expectations, have often been
characterized using constructs such as locus of control,
self-esteem,
self-efficacy, and autonomy. Benard[67]
concluded that resilient children have high expectations, a meaning for life,
goals, personal agency, and inter-personal problem-solving skills. All of these
things work together to prevent the debilitating behaviors that are associated
with learned helplessness. Chess[68]
identified “adaptive distancing” as the psychological process whereby an
individual can stand apart from distressed family members and friends in order
to accomplish constructive goals and advance his or her psychological
development. Moving away to college after high school is a way of practicing
adaptive distancing.[69]
Classrooms in which students are given an opportunity to respond, an engaging
cooperative learning environment, a participating role in setting goals, and a
high expectation for student achievement. All of these characteristics help
students develop a sense of belonging and involvement. These two
characteristics help to reduce the feelings of alienation and disengagement.
With that kind of connection in the school, students will have more of a
protective shield against the adverse circumstances that life throws at them.
Communities play a huge role in
fostering resilience. Benard[70]
identifies three characteristics of those types of communities (1) availability
of social organizations that provide an array of resources to residents, (2)
consistent expression of social norms so that community members understand what
constitutes desirable behavior, (3) and opportunities for children and youth to
participate in the life of the community as valued members. The clearest sign
of a cohesive and supportive community is the presence of social organizations
that provide healthy human development.[71]
Services are unlikely to be used unless there is good communication concerning
them. Community-school relationships are very important to give extra resources
to meet even basic psychological needs of students and families.
Fostering resilience in children
requires family environments that are caring and structured, hold high
expectations for children’s behavior, and encourage participation in the life
of the family.[72]
Most resilient children have a strong relationship with at least one adult, not
always a parent, and this relationship helps to diminish risk associated with
family discord. Benard[70]
found that even though divorce produces stress, the availability of social
support from family and community can reduce stress and yield positive
outcomes. Any family that emphasizes the value of assigned chores, caring for
brothers or sisters, and the contribution of part-time work in supporting the
family helps to foster resilience.[73]
The Main Street Missionary Baptist
Church prepares to hold service out on Main Street in Biloxi, Miss. Hurricane
Katrina caused extensive damage to buildings all along the Mississippi gulf
coast and caused the evacuation of New Orleans
When youths from problem
neighbourhoods join a church their academic performance improves. The poorer a
neighbourhood is, the more church attendance helps kids academically. Improving
academic performance seems to flow more from attending church than from merely
believing. The church's social life influences youth from poor communities more
than doctrine does. Church attendance also improves the physical, social, and
emotional health of students.[74]
According to Glen Elder: "What you have in the role of the religious
community is a selected group of people who share values and are committed to
the success of the child".[74]
This pattern is likely the result of many protective processes that take place
inside a religious institution. Ungar and his colleagues[75]
identified seven aspects of resilience across many different cultures. Each
depends on the other. These seven aspects include:
1. Access to material resources
|
Availability of financial,
educational, medical and employment assistance and/or opportunities, as well
as access to food, clothing and shelter
|
2. Access to supportive
relationships
|
Relationships with significant
others, peers and adults within one’s family and community
|
3. Development of a desirable
personal identity
|
Desirable sense of one’s self as
having a personal and collective sense of purpose, ability for self-appraisal
of strengths and weaknesses, aspirations, beliefs and values, including
spiritual and religious identification
|
4. Experiences of power and
control
|
Experiences of caring for one’s
self and others, the ability to effect change in one’s social and physical
environment in order to access health resources
|
5. Adherence to cultural
traditions
|
Adherence to, or knowledge of,
one’s local and/or global cultural practices, values and beliefs
|
6. Experiences of social justice
|
Experiences related to finding a
meaningful role in one’s community that brings with it acceptance and social
equality
|
7. Experiences of a sense of
cohesion with others
|
Balancing one’s personal interests
with a sense of responsibility to the greater good; feeling a part of
something larger than one’s self socially and spiritually
|
For example, attending a church has
been shown to increase a child’s social network, provide a feeling of cohesion
and belonging in her community, even promote a sense of personal control and
sense of social justice when threatened. It is this complexity and multilevel
nature of resilience that explains how people use the internal and external
resources (assets) that are both available and accessible to overcome
adversity.[76]
Some studies confirmed the
association between resilience and positive emotion (e.g., Ong, Bergeman,
Bisconti, & Wallace, 2006;[77]
Tugade et al., 2004).[78]
Examining the role positive emotion plays in
resilience, Ong et al. (2006) found that widows with high levels of resilience
experience more positive (e.g., peaceful) and negative (e.g., anxious) emotions
than those with low levels. The former group shows high emotional complexity
which is the capacity to maintain the differentiation of positive and negative
emotional states while underlying stress.
Ong et al. (2006) further suggest
that the adaptive consequence of resilience is a function of an increase in
emotional complexity while stress is present.
Moreover, high resilient widows
showed the likelihood of controlling their positive emotional experiences to
recover and bounce back from daily stress. Indeed, positive emotions were found
to disrupt the experience of stress and help high resilient individuals to recover
efficiently from daily stress (Fredrickson et al., 2003).[33]
In this case, some studies argue (e.g., Fredrickson et al., 2003; Tugade et al.,
2004) that positive emotion helps resilient people to construct psychological
resources that are necessary for coping successfully with significant
catastrophe, such as the September 11th attacks. As a result, positive emotion
experienced by resilient people functions as a protective factor to moderate
the magnitude of adversity to individuals and assists them to cope well in the
future (Tugade et al., 2004).
In addition to the above findings, a
study (Fredrickson et al., 2003) further suggests that positive emotions are
active elements within resilience.
By examining people’s emotional
responses to the September 11th, Fredrickson et al. (2003) suggests that
positive emotions are critical elements in resilience and as a mediator that
buffer people from depression after the crises. Moreover, high resilient people were more
likely to notice positive meanings within the problems they faced (e.g., felt
grateful to be alive), endured fewer depressive symptoms, and experienced more
positive emotions than low resilient people after terrorism attacks
(Fredrickson et al., 2003). Similar results were obtained in another study
regarding the effects of 911 attacks on resilient individuals’ healthy
adjustment (Bonanno et al., 2007).[44]
People with high levels of
resilience are likely to show low levels of depression, and less likely to
smoke cigarettes or use marijuana (Bonanno et al., 2007). Moreover, low resilient people
exhibit the difficulties of regulating negative emotions and demonstrate
sensitive reaction to daily stressful life events (e.g., the loss of loved one)
(Ong et al., 2006). They are likely to believe that there is no end for the
unpleasant experience of daily stressors and may have higher levels of stress.
In general, resilient people are believed to possess positive emotions, and
such emotions in turn influence their responses to adversity.
Psychological Resilience has been
studied in a number of groups. Among those are the children of European Jews in
the United States, the children of the Vietnamese boat people
in the United States. Middle class families in times of the great depression,
children of farmers in times of economical crisis, children of Spanish and
Vietnamese immigrants in Germany, adoptive children, who went through trauma
and malnutrition.
Nathan Caplan studied the children
of poor Vietnamese parents in the US. Most of these parents were refugees. In
many cases they did not own anything but the clothes they were wearing when
they arrived. Most did not speak English. Half of the parents had less than
five years of formal schooling. The refugees studied by Caplan lived in the
worst neighborhoods of big cities. Yet their children turned out to be
academically more successful than American middle class children.
Why?
Caplan et al. found out the
Vietnamese stress the value of education. Parents wanted their children to
enjoy a better education than they did themselves. The Vietnamese children
spend an average of 3 hours and 10 minutes per day doing their homework and
reading for school, while American middle class students just spend an average
of 1 hour and 30 minutes per day with these activities.
Nathan Caplan also found out the
older siblings were supposed to help their younger siblings. That way the
younger ones did not only learn facts but also attitudes towards school and
learning from their older siblings. The more siblings a child of Vietnamese
parentage has, the more likely is he or she to achieve in school.[79]
Germany is a multi-ethnic society.
8% of the population and 25% of the 15 year olds are born abroad themselves or
have as least one parent born abroad. In Germany Vietnamese families started
arriving as foreign workers during the 1980s and they are still coming in great
numbers to search for a better life. As a rule children of immigrants are not
as successful academically as children of native Germans. However it is not
true for children of Asian parentage. The Vietnamese are the biggest Asian
group in Germany and also one of the poorest ethnic groups. It has been found
that Vietnamese parents value education and that Vietnamese students spend a
lot more time learning than their German counterparts.[80],[81],[82]
Elder and Conger examined data from
several Iowa counties to see how the farm crisis of the 1980s and 1990s
affected children growing up in rural parts of the state. They found that a
that a large number of those young people were on paths to successful
development and life achievement. Most children of those children grew up to be
academically successful and law-abiding.
Elder was able to identify five
resource mechanisms:
- strong intergenerational bonds, joint activity between parents and children
- being socialized into productive roles in work and social leadership; stressing non-material goals
- a network of positive engagement in church, school, and community life
- close ties with grandparents, support from grandparents
- strong family connections with the community[83]
See also Iowa
Youth and Families Project
Elder studied the life of men who
were children during the Great Depression of 1929-1939 and came to maturity at
the outset of World War II. When these children came of age Elder found them to
be healthy, law abiding, well adapted and bright.
One stunning finding was that
poverty had slight positive effects on children from the middle classes. Once
they reached adulthood those men earned a college degree as often as men from
nondeprived middle class homes. In later life they did a little better in terms
of economic success than their nondeprived middle class peers.[84]
Men of working class background did
not do as well as men from middle class homes. However many of them were
upwardly mobile and on most measures they did do just as well as men from
never-deprived working class backgrounds.
Pregnancies among adolescents are
considered as a complication, as they favour education interruption, poor
present and future health, higher rates of poverty, problems for present and
future children, among other negative outcomes.[85]
Investigators from the Ecuadorian
Catholic University (Universidad
Católica de Santiago de Guayaquil)
(Guayaquil) and the Spanish University of Zaragoza (Zaragoza), performed a comparative study at the Enrique C.
Sotomayor Obstetric and Gynecology Hospital (Guayaquil) assessing resilience
differences between pregnant adolescents
and adults.[86]
A 56.6% of gravids presented total
CESD-10 scores 10 or more indicating depressed mood. Despite this, total
CESD-10 scores and depressed mood rate did not differ among studied groups.
Adolescents did however display lower resilience reflected by lower total
resilience scores and a higher rate of scores below the calculated median (P
< 0.05). Logistic regression analysis could not establish any risk factor
for depressed mood among studied subjects; however, having an adolescent
partner and a preterm delivery related to a higher risk for lower resilience.
In the 1970s, Spain was a
dictatorship under the rule of Francisco Franco.
Many Spaniards fled to Germany in search of a better life. Most of those
immigrants were poor and only few were able to speak proper German. Today their
children do as well as German children when it comes to educational success and
Spaniard adults do as well as German adults when it comes to occupational
success.[87][88]
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