Annual Research Review: Positive adjustment to adversity--trajectories of minimal-impact resilience and emergent resilience

Abstract

Background: Research on resilience in the aftermath of potentially traumatic life events (PTE) is still evolving. For decades, researchers have documented resilience in children exposed to corrosive early environments, such as poverty or chronic maltreatment. Relatively more recently, the study of resilience has migrated to the investigation of isolated PTE in adults.

Methods: In this article, we first consider some of the key differences in the conceptualization of resilience following chronic adversity versus resilience following single-incident traumas, and then describe some of the misunderstandings that have developed about these constructs. To organize our discussion, we introduce the terms emergent resilience and minimal-impact resilience to represent trajectories of positive adjustment in these two domains, respectively.

Results: We focused in particular on minimal-impact resilience, and reviewed recent advances in statistical modeling of latent trajectories that have informed the most recent research on minimal-impact resilience in both children and adults and the variables that predict it, including demographic variables, exposure, past and current stressors, resources, personality, positive emotion, coping and appraisal, and flexibility in coping and emotion regulation.

Conclusions: The research on minimal-impact resilience is nascent. Further research is warranted with implications for a multiple levels of analysis approach to elucidate the processes that may mitigate or modify the impact of a PTE at different developmental stages.

Figure 1. Graphic comparison of minimal-impact and emergent resilience

The upper panel (a) represents minimal-impact resilience as a stable trajectory of healthy adjustment following an isolated PTE, with recovery as a gradual return to baseline. The lower panel (b) represents emergent resilience as a gradual movement toward healthy adjustment following a period of struggle with chronically aversive circumstances. The overall figure was modified from a similar figure presented by Masten and Narayan (2012). Aspects of panel 1a were adapted specifically from Masten and Narayan (2012) and aspects of panel 1b were adapted from Bonanno (2004).

Figure 1. Graphic comparison of minimal-impact and emergent resilience

The upper panel (a) represents minimal-impact resilience as a stable trajectory of healthy adjustment following an isolated PTE, with recovery as a gradual return to baseline. The lower panel (b) represents emergent resilience as a gradual movement toward healthy adjustment following a period of struggle with chronically aversive circumstances. The overall figure was modified from a similar figure presented by Masten and Narayan (2012). Aspects of panel 1a were adapted specifically from Masten and Narayan (2012) and aspects of panel 1b were adapted from Bonanno (2004).

Figure 2. Prototypical outcome trajectories following isolated PTEs

The six most common longitudinal trajectories observed in research on individual variation in response to isolated, potentially traumatic life events (PTEs). The health-dysfunction axis represents elevated symptoms and distress at one end and positive adjustment and the relative absence of symptoms and distress at the other end. The figure is adapted and expanded from Bonanno (2004).