Resilience Flashcards
Resilience to Adversity:
Other ways individuals may differ from each other in an applied health context rather than via personality.
What is the distinction and separation of categories of Clinical Trauma vs. Severe Stressors / Adversity?
Resilience Prevalence in Bereavement 1 Methods:
Most bereavement studies survey participants after the bereavement has happened.
(Bereavement is the experience of losing someone important to us and is characterized by grief)
What is wrong with this method?
These studies exclude the pre-trauma/pre-adversity levels due to only focusing on outcomes after the event had happened
Problem:
Cannot note if there was an increase in the symptoms before event
We can make assumptions but it is still Retrospective data
Adversity:
What is this the definition of?
A type of aversive event particularly severe ‘exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury or sexual violence’.
-has to be diagnosed by a clinical psychiatrist
-has a definition in (DSM-5 criteria)
Traumatic events
Does not include:
Negative and severely stressful major life events that disrupt and impact quality of life (e.g., divorce, job loss). But do have an impact regardless of diagnosis.
Resilience research = diversity of stressful events.
Prevalence of resilience:
How frequently do individuals experience resilience
Historically?
Bonanno (2004) - bereavement theorists
(experience of losing someone important to us, characterized by grief)
Now?
Historically, R viewed as RARE occurrence.
People were expected to have a reaction (not a stable course of symptoms over time)
When they did not show criteria, Bereavement theorists viewed this as absent grief as a rare and pathological reaction. Suppressing emotional response (delayed response) or not being closed to the person they lost.
BUT Now: Research contradicts this assumption arguing people have become more resilient to adversity due to methods when studying R previously.
Which type of event is defined by an individual’s reaction to them (eg. have to experience some PTSD symptoms toward event)?
Traumatic events
What are these definitions describing?
-the ability to ‘bounce back’ and flexibly adapt to changing
demands of negative life situations
-involve a positive response/adaption to negative circumstances of aversive events
Most important definition:
-an outcome pattern characterized by a stable trajectory of
healthy functioning after adversity
Resilience (R)
- an outcome over time characterised by stable functioning
Resilience Prevalence in Bereavement 2:
How did Bonanno, Wortman, et al., (2002) categorise who and who was not resilient in their study of their Prospective study of Resilience Prevalence?
Participants were categorized based on patterns of change of their baseline pre-event scores:
People vary in their ability to be resilient in the face of adversity, loss and trauma.
Name the 2 ways Resilience is measured:
Resilience questionnaires
Resilience trajectory
Which method is this describing to measure resilience?
Measured like a trait
Questions about how you generally react to stressors.
Resilience (self-report) questionnaires
Which method is this describing to measure resilience?
Measured after the event (for several months or years)
A Longitudinal design
Identifies people that show a resilient outcome pattern over time.
Resilience trajectory
Resilience Prevalence in Bereavement 1 Methods:
How can Prospective studies of Resilience Prevalence be carried out?
Can derive many participants from existing longitudinal data sets in a period of time where you have pre-event data
Bonanno, Wortman, et al., (2002):
Prospective study on spousal loss.
205 participants from existing longitudinal data set.
Depression measured: pre-loss, 6 & 18-months after spousal loss.
What does this graph show in relation to Adversity?
Y axis explains how much disruption individuals have had in their functioning
(Clinical diagnosis levels are severe, not mild)
Mild level- patient still experiences symptoms of depression towards event but not enough to affect daily functioning or for a diagnosis
Outcome patterns over time:
Looking at how Resilience/ different outcomes unfold overtime from the event
The stable functioning definition of R:
bottom line. Individuals never get out of the mild symptom range
Recovery line:
Over time mild/moderate symptoms decrease showing recovery
Delayed reaction:
Distressed (moderate) Symptoms start to decrease but then increase after 1 year, becoming severe
Chronic reaction:
Starts with severe symptoms, staying in the chronic stress reaction
Resilience Prevalence in Bereavement 3:
What did Bonanno, Wortman, et al., (2002) find in their study of their Prospective study of Resilience Prevalence?
Did not find any evidence for Absent Grief (a stable course of mild negative symptoms over time)
as 46% (almost half of the sample) who experienced spasm loss were resilient= Most common outcome
11% common grief
15% chronic grief
Furthermore found no evidence of pre-loss differences in attachment to a spouse or marriage difficulties (to explain resilient pattern)
Resilient people are still affected by a bereavement: yearning, emotional upset, and intrusive thoughts. But it did not interrupt their daily lives.
What do these graphs show in relation to Adversity?
Delayed dysfunction is similar to delayed reaction
The resistance graph would be what other psychologists would call resilience. The resilience graph is presented as a bounce-back graph model.
Thus the way Adversity and resilience is measured differs in terms of how you define it.
Mancini, Bonanno & Clark (2011):
Prospective study using GSEOP data.
464 people experienced SPOUSAL LOSS within 20 waves of data collection.
(measure of resilience has changed as they used a measure of subjective wellbeing/ life satisfaction).
Subjective well-being was used as the outcome measure.
What did the LGMM reveal?
A 4-class solution was best fit to data.
Improved was not common
However, Resilient and Chronic Low group look very similar
Problem: Statistics do not differentiate between people, only specify subgroups
This paper argued that individuals are not classified as R due to having a lower starting point of subjective wellbeing.
Mancini, Bonanno & Clark (2011):
Prospective study using GSEOP data.
629 people experienced DIVORCE within 20 waves of data collection.
(measure of resilience has changed as they used a measure of subjective wellbeing/ life satisfaction).
Subjective well-being was used as the outcome measure.
What did the LGMM reveal?
A 3-class solution was best fit to data.
According to psychologists, we would expect to see satisfaction levels decrease, but graph shows the opposite or same levels of well-being.
Most individuals were R, showing stability in functioning over time
Is Resilience the Common Trajectory (route)?
Norris et al. (2009) examined outcome trajectories using longitudinal data in response to two disasters.
Two communities (n = 561) severely affected by 1999 floods in Mexico.
Residents of NYC (n = 1267) after 9/11 terrorist attacks in USA.
PTSD symptoms were measured post-disaster
6, 12, 18 & 24 months post-disaster (Mexico)
6-9 months after 9/11 then 6, 18, 30 months after wave 1 (USA)
They did not have any pre-baseline data.
This is another example of how people define resilience differently
Arguing that stability would be better characterized as resistance and adaptability as resilience.
Results of prevalence rates showed?
Not much difference between México flood events
However, at face value, Resilience is not the strongest most common trajectory due to low scores of 10%.
Multidimensional Study Approach to Resilient Outcomes:
Infurna & Luthar (2017): analysis of 13 waves (2001-2013) of existing longitudinal data: Household Income and Labour Dynamics of Australia Study.
421 individuals all of whom were widowed during the study.
Selected multiple domains of outcomes measuring adjustment:
Life satisfaction
Positive emotions
Negative emotions
General health
Physical functioning in multiple daily activities (e.g., walking)
Then conducted a series of GMM analyses to identify different outcome trajectories for each outcome.
Analyzed 5 years before and 5 years after bereavement.
Resilience outcome trajectories were defined as stable good functioning over time (cf. Bonanno, 2004).
What were the findings?
Resilience was the most common outcome for life satisfaction!
