essay plan for resilience Flashcards
positive outcomes despite exposure to risk factors, discuss the processes supporting resilience in children and adolescents?
mental health and parenting of mother:
linked together and found to be a protective factor against violence and preventing resilience when poor
attachment:
the combination of maternal parenting and mental health
linked to responsivity to stress and coping strategies which offers explanations to why contributes to resilience or not
biological resilience:
heritability estimate, of biological resilience whereby HPA axis effective, linked to problem focused coping, linked to resilience
more sustained cognitive appraisals (with biological correlate) due to increased activation of PFC, supported through trait of harm avoidance being negatively associated with resilience
personal factors:
heritability of certain traits like persistance, strongly linked to resilience as well as self-directedness and cooperativeness
factors of coping that boys problem focused and girls emotion
mention difficulty in defining and operationalising resilience, as not only multi-dimensional but also whether it infers lack of negative outcome or actual positive outcome - due to difficulty in assessing ‘positive outcomes’ and multi-dimensional outcomes, such as cognitive, intellectual, social etc., preventing comparability between studies, this essay will define a positive outcome as lack of maladjustment seen in others as a result of risk (aversion of mental, or behavioural problems) and also as a risk factor, violence will be the main one used due to the pervasiveness across cultures and ages
paragraph 1?
2 processes fostering resilience in children and adolescents are parenting and maternal mental health, which come hand in hand as it appears that maternal mental health, and perhaps the causes of it, lead to a poorer parenting style:
- it was found that over the course of 3 years, 54% of children exposed to family violence appeared resilient, no behavioural/emotional problems, with maternal mental health and the child’s temperament facilitating this (Martinez-Torteya et al, 2009), supported by a study in Palestine, finding that factors associated with resilience were maternal mental health and education (which may have links to parenting style), whereas vulnerability was associated with poor maternal mental health (Massad et al, 2009)
- maternal mental health may link to parenting style, as found that mothers with PTSD had negative representations of children due to violence in childhood, reducing attunement to child, which was found to be a key predictor of externalising behaviours (Johnson et al, 2007). The relevance of parenting style is emphasised when noting that only 9% of mothers were classified as insightful when their child was being clinically treated for behavioural problems (Oppenheim et al, 2004) so suggested would be protective factor
improving mental health symptoms through increased feelings of self-efficacy as a parent, due to an improved parenting style intervention (Reyno et al, 2006).
paragraph 2?
the culmination of these factors manifests as attachment, which has important associations with coping, linked to resilience:
mothers internalise their experience of attachment with their primary caregiver, which may be replicated in their parenting and attachment type in their child
found that children with secure attachments had less threatening appraisals of situations, lower levels of distress and better coping strategies (problem focused) than insecure, which resilience may stem from or indeed disorders will stem from without (Mikulincer et al, 2013), supported through finding that insecurely attached individuals had greater physiological measures of distress, such as increased blood pressure, when recalling stressful situations, suggesting physiological maladaptation, reducing the ability to be resilient, may stem from insecure attachments (Diamond et al, 2006) and higher cortisol levels (Kidd et al, 2011)
in a longitudinal study, it was found that an intervention increasing attachment security over 6 years, moved coping strategies to focused, active coping, supporting the role of attachment as providing resilience resources (Zhang et al, 2004)
these finding indicate the importance of secure attachments, which are contributed to by maternal mental health and parenting style, in decreasing and improving reactivity to stress, which can only aid resilience
paragraph 3?
biological factors as mentioned above:
the physiological reactivity to stress mentioned previously also has a genetic component: indeed biological heritability of resilience is estimated to be 52% in men and 38% for women (Boardman et al, 2008), which may be defined as effective activation and deactivation of the HPA axis in response to stress, which is modulated by biologically inherited factors and may be related to more problem focused coping, a feature of resilience (Feder et al, 2009),
biological correlates of better cognitive appraisals related to resilience:
also found that in resilient individuals, without having PTSD after experiencing sexual trauma, had more effective and sustained cognitive reappraisals of stressful situations, as shown through increased prefrontal cortex activation, leading to better emotion regulation. so engaging with unpleasant stimuli for longer is associated with better resilience (New et al, 2009), supported by the finding that harm avoidance (which may be related to less sustained and less effective appraisals and also not problem-focused coping, is negatively associated with resilience (Eley et al, 2013)
biological processes promoting resilience have applications for treatment, supporting the use of stress innoculation training to make the individual actively cope with a stressful environment and to decrease reactivity of the HPA axis, fostering strategies to promote resilience in the future (Feder et al, 2009)
paragraph 4?
traits as stable processes and other personal factors fostering development of resilience:
in addition to physiological reactivity to stress as a biological factor: some traits may be heritable, such as persistance which is moderately correlated with resilience (Eley et al, 2013), due to its link with the noradrenergic system (Cloninger et al, 1994)
found that 39% of variance in resilience can be accounted for by different personality traits, which has implications for interventions (Eley et al, 2013)
indeed other traits have been correlated with resilience: cooperativeness and self-directedness (adapting beh. to demands of situ) (Eley et al, 2013), so suggestion that in interventions, certain traits should be developed in children and others should be minimised to maximise personal potential (not taking into account external factors) for fostering resilience
found that girls are more likely to cope with stressful situations through emotion-focused coping whereas males are more likely to actively face the problem, the former method has been found to be less effective in reducing distress, therefore another personal factor to focus on in interventions (Carver et al, 1989)
something to add in conclusion?
differentiated internal and external factors (ones that can be altered by the individual with the help of interventions and ones that require interventions due to being outside the individuals control)
importance of fostering resilience in young children through existing factors and interventions is emphasised by the finding that individuals identified as resilient were still found to be positively adapted 30 years later, indicating the lasting, positive effects of processes promoting resilience (Werner, 1994)
