This article reviews the research on resilience in order to delineate its significance and potential for understanding normal development. Resilience refers to the process of, capacity for, or outcome of successful adaptation despite challenging or threatening circumstances. Three resilience phenomena are reviewed: (a) good outcomes in high-risk children, (b) sustained competence in children under stress, and (c) recovery from trauma. It is concluded that human psychological development is highly buffered and that long-lasting consequences of adversity usually are associated with either organic damage or severe interference in the normative protective processes embedded in the caregiving system. Children who experience chronic adversity fare better or recover more successfully when they have a positive relationship with a competent adult, they are good learners and problem-solvers, they are engaging to other people, and they have areas of competence and perceived efficacy valued by self or society. Future studies of resilience will need to focus on processes that facilitate adaptation. Such studies have the potential to illuminate the range and self-righting properties of, constraints on, and linkages among different aspects of cognitive, emotional, and social development.
Competent outcomes in late adolescence were examined in relation to adversity over time,
antecedent competence and psychosocial resources, in order to investigate the phenomenon of
resilience. An urban community sample of 205 (114 females, 90 males; 27% minority) children
were recruited in elementary school and followed over 10 years. Multiple methods and
informants were utilized to assess three major domains of competence from childhood through
adolescence (academic achievement, conduct, and peer social competence), multiple aspects of
adversity, and major psychosocial resources. Both variable-centered and person-centered
analyses were conducted to test the hypothesized significance of resources for resilience. Better
intellectual functioning and parenting resources were associated with good outcomes across
competence domains, even in the context of severe, chronic adversity. IQ and parenting appeared
to have a specific protective role with respect to antisocial behavior. Resilient adolescents (high
adversity, adequate competence across three domains) had much in common with their
low-adversity competent peers, including average or better IQ, parenting, and psychological
well-being. Resilient individuals differed markedly from their high adversity, maladaptive peers
who had few resources and high negative emotionality. Results suggest that IQ and parenting
scores are markers of fundamental adaptational systems that protect child development in the
context of severe adversity.
This article discusses the building blocks for a developmental psychopathology, focusing on studies of risk, competence, and protective factors. The current Project Competence studies of stress and competence are described, with particular attention to the methodology and strategies for data analysis. The authors present a 3-model approach to stress resistance in a multivariate regression framework: the compensatory, challenge, and protective factor models. These models are illustrated by selected data. In the concluding section, an evaluation of the project is offered in terms of future directions for research.
Two objectives provided the focus for the Conference on Community Violence and Children's Development that was jointly sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. One was to examine the evidence for deficit behaviors that characterized children reared in poverty; the second was to identify the characteristics of children who sustained their competencies despite being reared in comparable environments. These dual objectives took this form: "What can we conclude from studies of children, their families, and environments about characteristics that predispose children to maladjustment following exposure to violence, and about characteristics that protect children from such adjustment problems following, or in the midst of, violence exposure?"
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