Resilience as the Ability to Maintain Well-Being: An Allostatic Active Inference Model

Abstract

Resilience is often characterized as the outcome of well-being maintenance despite threats to that well-being. We suggest that resilience can also be characterized as an emotional-intelligence-related ability to obtain this outcome. We formulate an allostatic active inference model that outlines the primary tools of this resilience ability as monitoring well-being, maintaining stable well-being beliefs while updating situational beliefs and flexibly prioritizing actions that are expected to lead to well-being maintenance or gathering the information needed to discern what those actions could be. This model helps to explain the role of positive emotions in resilience as well as how people high in resilience ability use regulatory flexibility in the service of maintaining well-being and provides a starting point for assessing resilience as an ability.

Keywords: active inference; allostasis; resilience; well-being.

Figure 1

The proposed relationship between maintenance of high well-being and magnitude of the threat to well-being as a function of resilience ability. Note that this graph only portrays the maintenance of high well-being, because low well-being would just represent low resilience ability regardless of the magnitude of threat to well-being.

Figure 2

An allostatic active interference model of well-being. To achieve the goal of high well-being, individuals select actions that promote positive well-being changes and information gain, known as minimizing expected free energy. During this action selection, an internal model estimates the likelihood of well-being change outcomes, allowing the individual to make predictions. After performing the action, individuals observe how the actions impacted their well-being and must update their predictive model to minimize the degree to which the model predicts the wrong outcome in the future. This prediction error along with a valuation of parsimony is known as the variational free energy (VFE). Individuals with high resilience ability maintain stably positive global beliefs about well-being in the face of threats and flexibly regulate when to update and when to maintain situational beliefs about well-being.