SHORT COMMUNICATIONFactors associated with resilience in healthy adults
Introduction
Resilience, the relative capacity for healthy adaptation to life adversities, has been increasingly identified as an important area of both research and clinical intervention, and its biopsychosocial substrates are becoming better elucidated (Charney, 2004). There are different ways that studies have defined and measured resilience, including overall psychosocial functioning, or measures of hardiness and coping skills (Connor and Zhang, 2006). The absence of major psychopathology, in and of itself, does not comprise an adequate indicator of resilience. Mature defenses (sublimation, humor, anticipation, and suppression) comprise one well-established model of positive mental health, powerfully predicting psychological well-being in a community male sample followed prospectively over 45 years (Vaillant and Vaillant, 1990), and comprising a validated indicator of resilience (Vaillant, 2003). In the current study of healthy volunteers, we explored the relationships between this index of resilience and several factors that have been implicated in healthy adaptation, namely temperament, childhood trauma, attachment style, baseline and stress-related cortisol measures, and cognitive performance under stress.
Section snippets
Methods
Healthy adult volunteers in this study were part of a larger study examining HPA axis function in dissociative disorders, PTSD, and normal control subjects (Simeon et al., 2007); data reported here are not replicated in the prior study. Participants were broadly recruited via newspaper advertisements and postings or were self-referred via internet websites and other resources. They were phone screened and, if appropriate, evaluated by a psychiatrist to determine eligibility. Inclusion criteria
Results
Participants were 25 women and 29 men, with a mean age of 33.2 years (SD=11.0). Resilience was fairly normally distributed in the sample (mean=5.7, SD=1.0, median=5.8, skewness=−0.20, kurtosis=−0.23, range=3.6–8). Resilience was not significantly associated with age or gender.
Childhood trauma total score ranged from 25 to 67, with a mean of 33.8 (SD=9.2). Trauma encountered in the sample ranged from none at all to substantial, such as separation from both parents for many years, witnessing
Discussion
Determinants of resilience include neurobiological, genetic, temperamental, and environmental influences (2). Our findings present evidence for three of these domains in a single sample of adult participants without psychiatric disorders: temperament, attachment, childhood interpersonal trauma, urinary cortisol, and cognitive performance under stress. In this sample, of all variables measured resilience was most strongly associated (negatively) with childhood trauma. Childhood adversity has
Role of funding source
Supported in part by NIMH RO1 MH62414 to Dr. Simeon and NIH MO1 RR0071 to the Mount Sinai School of Medicine General Clinical Research Center.
Conflict of interest
None declared.
Acknowledgments
Dr. Simeon was supported in part by NIMH RO1 MH62414 and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine General Clinical Research Center by NIH MO1 RR0071.
References (19)
- et al.
Development and validation of a brief screening version of the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire
Child Abuse Neglect
(2003) - et al.
Relationship of resilience to personality, coping, and psychiatric symptoms in young adults
Behav. Res. Ther.
(2006) - et al.
Self-esteem, locus of control, hippocampal volume, and cortisol regulation in young and old adulthood
NeuroImage
(2005) - et al.
Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis function in dissociative disorders, PTSD, and healthy volunteers
Biol. Psychiatry
(2007) - et al.
Adrenocortical stress responses and altered working memory performance
Psychophysiology
(2002) Defense Style Questionnaire
Psychobiological mechanisms of resilience and vulnerability: implications for successful adaptation to extreme stress
Am. J. Psychiatry
(2004)A systematic method for clinical description and classification of personality variants
Arch. Gen. Psychiatry
(1987)- et al.
Resilience: determinants, measurement, and treatment responsiveness
CNS Spectr.
(2006)
Cited by (119)
Associations of resilience, white matter topological organization, and cognitive functions in first-episode, drug-naïve schizophrenia patients: A moderated mediation analysis
2024, Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological PsychiatryBehavioral flexibility impacts on coping and emotional responses in male mice submitted to social defeat stress
2023, Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological PsychiatryFrom Theory to Patient Care: A Model for the Development, Adaptation, and Testing of Psychosocial Interventions for Patients With Serious Illness
2021, Journal of Pain and Symptom ManagementCitation Excerpt :In our case, decades of work in behavioral and social sciences suggested that theories of individual resilience were inconsistent.12,15–17 Resilience had been defined as a (perhaps immutable) trait, such as grit or hardiness.18,19 It had been defined as an outcome, or relatively positive state of being, after a particular stressor.17,20–22
Heritability of brain resilience to perturbation in humans
2021, NeuroImageIntegrative psycho-biophysiological markers in predicting psychological resilience
2021, PsychoneuroendocrinologyCitation Excerpt :To date, findings from the literature regarding the direct association between HPA reactivity and resilience were inconsistent. For instance, less activation of the HPA axis at baseline was found in high resilient people, whereas no significant differences in cortisol slope during a laboratory social stress task were observed between high and low resilient groups (Mikolajczak et al., 2008; Simeon et al., 2007). In a more recent study, the Area Under the Curve with respect to the increase (AUCi) of cortisol during a laboratory stress task was found to be similar between the high and low resilient groups (García-León et al., 2019).