Implicit Processing of Environmental Resources in Psychological Resilience

Abstract

Psychological resilience refers to the human capacity to cope with distressing events such as abuse, disaster, and other stressful or traumatic circumstances. Previous investigations by using self-report questionnaires have focused exclusively on explicit aspects of psychological resilience. The present study investigated the relationship between implicit and explicit aspects of psychological resilience. We used a self-report questionnaire consisting of four types of psychological resilience scales as a measure of explicit aspects of psychological resilience. At the same time, we measured implicit aspects of psychological resilience by employing an implicit association test (IAT) that was designed to reveal participants' implicit associations between closely related people (family member, companion, and friend), and calm/ anxiety attitudes. Our results showed that IAT scores exhibited significant interactions with questionnaire scores. We discuss potential links between explicit and implicit aspects of psychological resilience in terms of the availability of companion as environmental resources.

Understanding How Resilience is Measured in the Organizational Sciences

“…It is important to note that there are also implicit measures of resilience that attempt to capture resilience indirectly, such as through projective measurement, having participants write stories about adverse events (Strümpfer, 2001), or by seeing how well participants identify themselves with "resilient" qualities (e.g., calm attitudes; Ihaya, Yamada, Kawabe, & Nakamura, 2010). We wish to acknowledge these rare but innovative forms of measurement; in the current study, however, we are focused on the items contained in the most commonly utilized among these various approaches (i.e., self-report resilience measures) and better understanding the substantive resilience themes and factors that these measures are capturing.…”

The bright side of negative experience: Preexposure to negative image improves non-judging attitude in mindfulness meditation

“…This is because when people experience strongly negative events, there should be a psychological function that helps them to recover from mental shock. Such a function is known as psychological resilience (Ihaya et al, 2010), and mindfulness possibly contributes to this function. If this hypothesis is true, the non-judging attitude in trait mindfulness, which is involved with the suppression of negative emotion (Reynolds et al, 2013), would be improved in order to attenuate negative emotion after encountering negative events.…”