Psychological Resilience, Mental Health, and Inhibitory Control Among Youth and Young Adults Under Stress

Abstract

Psychological resilience allows one to cope successfully with adversities occurring during stressful periods, which may otherwise trigger mental illness. Recent models suggest that inhibitory control (IC), the executive control function which supports our goal-directed behavior and regulates our emotional response, may underlie resilience. However, the ways in which this is manifested during stressful situations in real life is still unclear. Here, we examined the relationship between IC, psychological resilience, psychological distress, and anxiety among 138 female and male participants in a stressful situation: during their initial combat training in the military. Using a mobile app, we assessed IC using emotional and non-emotional variations of the Go/No-Go task. Psychological resilience, psychological distress, and anxiety were assessed using mobile versions of self-report questionnaires. We found that psychological resilience is significantly correlated with non-emotional IC (r = 0.24, p < 0.005), but not with emotional IC; whereas, psychological distress and anxiety are correlated with emotional IC (r = -0.253, p < 0.005 and r = -0.224, p < 0.01, for psychological distress and anxiety, respectively), but not with non-emotional IC. A regression model predicting emotional IC confirmed non-emotional IC and distress as unique contributors to the variance, but not psychological distress. In addition, associations between psychological distress and emotional IC were found only for female participants. Collectively, the results clarify the link between IC, resilience, and mental health in real-life stressful situations, showing separate mechanisms of IC involved in resilience on the one hand, and mental health on the other hand. These results have implications for building mobile resilience interventions for youth and young adults facing stressful situations.

Keywords: Go/No-Go; cognitive control; executive function; field study; gender; inhibition; mental resilience.

Figure 1

Go/No-Go task examples. (A) A non-emotional Go/No-Go task example. Images of nature scenes appear sequentially, and the user should respond quickly to all images (Go, foils, 80% of trials) but withhold response to rare image (No-Go, target, 20% of stimuli). In this case, the No-Go target is a specific image out of the set. The task included 100 trials. (B) An emotional Go/No-Go task example. Images showing facial expressions appear sequentially on the screen. The user should respond quickly to emotional faces (either happy or sad foil images/Go) and withhold from responding to rare neutral faces (target stimuli/No-Go). Images were taken from the KDEF image set. Written consent for publication of human identity revealing images was obtained from the creators of the KDEF set.

Figure 2

Histograms showing frequency distributions of self-report questionnaires: (A) Psychological resilience scale, CD-RISC10; (B) Psychological distress, K6 scale; (C) Anxiety (GAD-7 scale).

Figure 3

(A,B) Non-emotional (A) and emotional (B) IC performance (Go/ No-Go tasks mean target accuracy) as a function of PR (CD-RISK-10 total score). (C,D) Non-Emotional (C) and emotional (D) IC performance as a function of PD (K6 total score). (E,F) Non-Emotional (E) and emotional (F) IC performance as a function of anxiety (GAD7 total score). Linear regression lines are shown. **p < 0.01.

Figure 4

Pearson correlations between emotional and non-emotional IC, resilience and distress by gender. (A) Psychological resilience (CD-RISC total score) as a function of non-emotional IC for female (red dots) and male (blue dots) participants. Similar positive correlation exists between the two constructs for both genders. (B) Psychological distress (K6 total score) as a function of emotional IC. Significant correlation exists for female participants (red dots) but not for male participants (blue dots). Linear regression lines are shown.