Psychiatr News September 2, 2005
Volume 40, Number 17, page 14
© 2005 American Psychiatric Association
Resilience Shown in Youth Protects Against Adult Stress
Joan Arehart-Treichel
A new study suggests that resilience constitutes not just recovery from
adversity, but a personal growth from it that may then strengthen a person
against more of life's insults.
Building on work done by other investigators, a group of San Diego
researchers has found that resilience can temper the relationship between a
form of childhood maltreatment—emotional neglect—and current
psychiatric symptoms.
Further, they have identified some of the personality traits and one of the
coping styles that resilient individuals seem to possess.
Their findings are reported in "Relationship of Resilience to
Personality, Coping, and Psychiatric Symptoms in Young Adults," in press
with Behaviour Research and Therapy. The major author was Laura
Campbell-Sills, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychiatry
at the University of California at San Diego.
In their report, Campbell-Sills and her coworkers pointed out that
developmental psychologists have generally described the construct of
resilience as "a dynamic process wherein individuals display positive
adaptation despite experiences of significant adversity or trauma."
However, the essence of resilience, in their opinion, is "the capacity
to rebound from stress effectively and to attain good functioning despite
adversity."
They selected for their study 132 college students. Subjects were asked to
fill out the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale, a yardstick designed in 2003 to
measure resilience in adults since there are few well-validated measures of
resilience for use with adult populations. The scale includes questions such
as "I tend to bounce back after illness, injury, or other
hardships" and "I am able to handle unpleasant or painful feelings
like sadness, fear, and anger."
Subjects were also asked to fill out the NEO Five Factor Inventory, which
measures the "big five" dimensions of
personality—neuroticism (defined as a trait that includes negative
emotions, poor coping, and difficulty controlling impulses), extraversion,
openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness; the Coping Inventory for
Stressful Situations, which reveals whether a person reacts to difficult
situations with emotions, avoidance, or active problem-solving; the Childhood
Trauma Questionnaire-Short Form, designed to assess emotional neglect as well
as several other forms of childhood maltreatment; and, finally, the Brief
Symptom Inventory, which identifies any anxiety or depression symptoms an
individual may have experienced during the previous week.
Personality Traits Crucial
The researchers then examined subjects' results on the resilience scale and
on the personality scale to see whether they could find any association
between the two. Resilience, they discovered, had a highly significant,
positive relationship with both extraversion and conscientiousness, and a
highly significant, negative one with neuroticism. Resilience was also found
to have a small, but statistically significant, positive relationship with
openness and a nonsignificant positive link with agreeableness.
The investigators then examined subjects' results on the resilience scale
and on the coping-with-stress scale to see whether they could find any
association between resilience and the means by which a person copes with
stress. They found that active problem-solving in the face of stress was
positively linked with resilience, whereas simply responding emotionally to
stress was negatively linked.
Both the personality trait of conscientiousness and a task-oriented coping
style when under stress were found to contribute even more to resilience in
ethnic minority subjects than in Caucasian ones. Such contributions, the
researchers suspected, may give a number of minority individuals an edge over
nonminority individuals when faced with hardship. In fact, recent data have
revealed that minorities have a lower lifetime prevalence of certain
psychiatric disorders than do nonminorities. This lower lifetime prevalence in
turn may be due to their heightened psychological hardiness, or resilience,
Altha Stewart, M.D., president of the American Psychiatric Foundation and
former chair of APA's Council on Social Issues and Public Psychiatry,
suggested—in other words, "people who have suffered are somehow
better able to manage in spite of their difficulties (Psychiatric
News, May 20).
Finally, Campbell-Sills and her group looked to see whether resilience, as
measured by the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale, would moderate the
relationship between emotional neglect during childhood, as measured by the
Childhood Trauma Questionnaire-Short Form, and current psychiatric symptoms,
as measured by the Brief Symptom Inventory. They expected that individuals
endorsing relatively high levels of childhood neglect and low levels of
resilience would manifest high levels of current psychiatric symptoms, whereas
individuals reporting high levels of childhood neglect in combination with
high resilience would manifest low levels of current psychiatric symptoms. And
this is what they found.
But they found something else interesting as well—individuals who had
experienced childhood neglect and who scored high on resilience reported even
fewer current psychiatric symptoms than did individuals who had not
experienced childhood neglect and who scored high on resilience.
This finding, Campbell-Sills and her team admitted, may appear
counterintuitive on the surface. "One would intuitively expect low
neglect/high resilience individuals to have the lowest levels of psychiatric
symptoms," they wrote. "However, there are some plausible
explanations for our finding that high neglect/high resilience individuals
appeared healthier. First, the finding is consistent with [the] contention
that resilience constitutes not just recovery but growth and strengthening
from adversity. Individuals who suffered from adversity in their home
environments yet coped effectively may have experienced additional personal
growth beyond that which characterized the young adults who came from more
nurturing environments. The result also may be explained in the context of
stress-inoculation theory, whereby a psychological and physiological
`toughening' occurs through exposure to moderate levels of stress."
Thus resilience, Campbell-Sills and her team concluded, might be
"viewed as a dynamic concept capturing positive adaptation and even
growth in the face of stress and trauma."
Resilience Can Be Tapped
Although this study focused exclusively on college students who took a
series of psychometric tests, it nonetheless contributes to the emerging
understanding of resilience, James Sabin, M.D., said in an interview.
Sabin, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and
director of the Ethics Program at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, has a special
interest in the mental illness recovery movement (Psychiatric News,
January 3, 2003).
Such understanding, he continued, can help psychiatrists recognize the
potential for resilience and growth in patients. "Recognizing the
capacity for resilience and growth is at least as important as recognizing
vulnerability and trauma," he asserted. "Recognizing resilience
and growth encourages us clinicians to be optimistic and hopeful even when in
the current moment our patient is experiencing significant symptoms and
dysfunction."
Moreover, he pointed out, a comprehensive, biopsychosocial understanding of
resilience could aid in the development of treatments that emphasize the
building of psychological strengths rather than simply the remediation of
symptoms.
"This perspective resonates with the mental illness recovery
movement," he said, "and helps us ally with our patients' wish to
enhance their lives, not simply to reduce their symptoms."
The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health. 
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