Beyond Risk and Protective Factors: An Adaptation-Based Approach to Resilience

Abstract

How does repeated or chronic childhood adversity shape social and cognitive abilities? According to the prevailing deficit model, children from high-stress backgrounds are at risk for impairments in learning and behavior, and the intervention goal is to prevent, reduce, or repair the damage. Missing from this deficit approach is an attempt to leverage the unique strengths and abilities that develop in response to high-stress environments. Evolutionary-developmental models emphasize the coherent, functional changes that occur in response to stress over the life course. Research in birds, rodents, and humans suggests that developmental exposures to stress can improve forms of attention, perception, learning, memory, and problem solving that are ecologically relevant in harsh-unpredictable environments (as per the specialization hypothesis). Many of these skills and abilities, moreover, are primarily manifest in currently stressful contexts where they would provide the greatest fitness-relevant advantages (as per the sensitization hypothesis). This perspective supports an alternative adaptation-based approach to resilience that converges on a central question: "What are the attention, learning, memory, problem-solving, and decision-making strategies that are enhanced through exposures to childhood adversity?" At an applied level, this approach focuses on how we can work with, rather than against, these strengths to promote success in education, employment, and civic life.

Does Exposure to Hostile Environments Predict Enhanced Emotion Detection?

“…First, as noted, the test settings inevitably differed between the student and the community sample. Second, testing our community sample in a computerized setting, rather than in a real-world, practical setting, may well have hindered their performance (Ellis et al, 2017). All of our students were familiar with test settings.…”

“…Some studies show that growing up in hostile social conditions predicts enhanced accuracy in threat detection (reviewed in Ellis, Bianchi, Griskevicius, & Frankenhuis, 2017;Frankenhuis & de Weerth, 2013). Others report bias towards heightened sensitivity to threat (reviewed in Crick & Dodge, 1994;De Castro & van Dijk, 2017).…”

“…At a group level, we expected the community sample to be more accurate at detecting an angry face in a crowd than the student sample (see Ellis et al, 2017;Frankenhuis & de Weerth, 2013). At an individual level, we expected people who had experienced more violence to be more accurate at detecting an angry face than people who had experienced less violence.…”

Incorporating epigenetic mechanisms to advance fetal programming theories

“…It is unclear whether there may be adaptive effects of stress in regulating development. Careful analysis, supported in part by the match-mismatch model, suggests that early stress exposures may result in developmental tradeoffs with both negative and positive phenotypic effects (reviewed in Ellis & Del Giudice, 2014; Ellis, Bianchi, Griskevicius, & Frankenhuis, 2017). …”

“…Harsh environments often harm or kill children, and the fact that children developmentally adapt to such rearing conditions (Ellis et al, 2017; Ellis et al, 2009) does not imply that such conditions either promote child well-being or should be accepted as unmodifiable facts of life (i.e., David Hume’s “naturalistic fallacy”). There can be no doubt that high-stress environments that are dangerous and lack essential resources, compared with low-stress environments that are safe and well resourced, undermine fitness.…”