Psychological Resilience in Response to Adverse Experiences

Resumen de los autores

In the field of developmental psychology, resilience is broadly understood as positive adaptation despite exposure to adversity. The concept provides an explanation for the wide variability in mental health outcomes observed in children exposed to adverse experiences. Although resilience has become an important and influential concept in the field, some fundamental questions remain, such as how it should be defined and operationalized and what the specific processes are that lead to positive mental health outcomes in some children but not others. These questions are particularly relevant in the context of the global refugee crisis to understand and promote resilience in children exposed to war and displacement. In this chapter the authors argue that a holistic view is required to understand resilience and provide a model integrating five important psychological concepts. The five components of our integrated model of resilience suggest that (a) development is nested within multiple psychosocial and bio-ecological systems; (b) individual differences in environmental sensitivity influence the individual response to both negative and positive aspects of the environment; (c) resilience mechanisms can be investigated across multiple levels of analysis; (d) the conceptualization of positive adaptation should consider multiple outcome dimensions; and (e) resilience represents a developmental process that needs to be examined longitudinally. After presenting this model, the authors review empirical studies in relation to each of these five components and suggest how they can be further applied in the study of resilience to war and displacement in refugee children.

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Cómo citar (APA 7)

Popham, C. M., McEwen, A. F. S., & Pluess, M. (2021). Psychological Resilience in Response to Adverse Experiences. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190095888.003.0022