Reflections on resilience

Abstract

Resilience research has long sought to understand how factors at the child, family, school, community, and societal levels shape adaptation in the face of adversities such as poverty and war. In this article we reflect on three themes that may prove to be useful for future resilience research. First is the idea that mental and physical health can sometimes diverge, even in response to the same social process. A better understanding of explanations for this divergence will have both theoretical and public health implications when it comes to efforts to promote resilience. Second is that more recent models of stress suggest that stress can accelerate aging. Thus, we suggest that research on resilience may need to also consider how resilience strategies may need to be developed in an accelerated fashion to be effective. Third, we suggest that if psychological resilience interventions can be conducted in conjunction with efforts to enact system-level changes targeted at adversities, this may synergize the impact that any single intervention can have, creating a more coordinated and effective set of approaches for promoting resilience in young people who confront adversity in life.

Framing resilience linked to parental ethnic‐racial socialization as hidden: A hidden resilience conceptual framework

“…In one study of 367 adolescents of color (Christophe et al, 2024), youth who received more cultural socialization and preparation for bias, on average, reported more frequent adjustments to their responses to stress via emotion regulation and persistence following adversity (i.e., Shift-and-Persist;Chen & Miller, 2012). In a separate but related literature, youth who shift-and-persist were found to show low levels of allostatic load, including lower inflammation and obesity, following adversity (for a review, see Chen et al, 2024). Although these separate literatures support our framework in a piece-wise fashion, shift-and-persist may be a mechanism through which ethnic-racial socialization leads to biological resilience among discriminated youth.…”