Adapting to life's slings and arrows: Individual differences in resilience when recovering from an anticipated threat

Abstract

Following highly negative events, people are deemed resilient if they maintain psychological stability and experience fewer mental health problems. The current research investigated how trait resilience (Block & Kremen, 1996, ER89) influences recovery from anticipated threats. Participants viewed cues ('aversive', 'threat', 'safety') that signified the likelihood of an upcoming picture (100% aversive, 50/50 aversive/neutral, or 100% neutral; respectively), and provided continuous affective ratings during the cue, picture, and after picture offset (recovery period). Participants high in trait resilience (HighR) exhibited more complete affective recovery (compared to LowR) after viewing a neutral picture that could have been aversive. Although other personality traits previously associated with resilience (i.e., optimism, extraversion, neuroticism) predicted affective responses during various portions of the task, none mediated the influence of trait resilience on affective recovery.

Figure 1

Diagram of the task. Participants received one of three cues; an ‘aversive’ cue indicated than an aversive picture will appear (1.0 probability); a ‘safety’ cue signified that the participants would see a neutral (certain) picture (1.0 probability). a ‘threat’ cue indicated that either an aversive (0.5 probability, unknown to participants), or neutral picture (0.5 probability) might appear.

Figure 2

Ratings for each trial type across the entire length of the trial (13 seconds in 1 sec bins). Lower values on the Y axis signify more negative affective ratings. The points on each line are significantly different from the corresponding points on all other lines except for time bins 8 – 13 for the Aversive trials (uncertain and certain). Lower values on the Y axis signify more negative affective ratings.

Figure 3

A. Resilience differences in the neutral trials across all time bins. High resilient show greater recovery as measured by a smaller difference between uncertain and certain neutral trials during the recovery period. B. Mean responses during the recovery period for the neutral trials. The difference between neutral trials for low resilient participants is significant (p < .001), and interaction between resilience and Certainty of neutral picture is also significant (p < .05).

Figure 4

Correlation coefficients between anticipation (safety – threat cues) and picture response (certain – uncertain; for each second of the picture period, and the mean of the recovery period) for all participants, and then high and low resilient participants separately. Note how correlations between anticipation and picture response remain high throughout the trial for low resilient participants, but not for high resilient participants (* p < .05, † p < .1).

Figure 5

Session effects for the recovery difference between low and high resilient participants. Note that affective recovery (attenuated difference between uncertain and certain neutral) is immediately apparent in session 1 for high resilient participants, but does not become apparent until session 2 for low resilient participants.