Resilience and adaptation to stress in later life: Empirical perspectives and conceptual implications

Abstract

As it has become more widely recognized that increasing numbers of people are living to progressively older ages, it is important to understand the nature of individual traits that promote resilience and welt-being in later life, to describe how these traits develop, to identify the factors that threaten and undermine their maintenance, and to elucidate the mechanisms that support and promote their growth. To have a knowledge base upon which to build intervention programs to improve and maintain well-being in later life, it is necessary to build understanding of what the multiple pathways are that lead to resilience, how these pathways may change, and what can be done to stop or forestall maladjustment and decline. Progress on these issues requires a greater understanding of process. In this article, we highlight theoretical areas of research on resilience and well-being that have received relatively little attention in previous work with older adults. We also identify unresolved methodological challenges associated with the measurement and analysis of within-person phenomena and elaborate on the implications of these challenges for process research in aging populations. Finally, we discuss future intervention directions to advance knowledge of resilience and positive health in later adulthood.

Hope as a source of resilience in later adulthood

“…Third, surprisingly little is known about how hope shapes the unfolding experience of stress and emotion in later adulthood. The larger literature on adult resilience suggests that the everyday stressors that accumulate in late adulthood provide a compelling context in which to investigative positive outcomes in response to challenge (Ong & Bergeman, 2004). Studying naturally occurring stressors in later life may thus provide an opportunity to assess the prevalence of individuals who in fact demonstrate positive outcomes in the face of adversity.…”

International studies in time perspective

“…Among the diversity of existing psychological time theories and theories of future time as part of it (De Volder & Lens, 1982;Miller & Brickman, 2004;Ong & Bergeman, 2004;Shmotkin & Eyal, 2003;Golovakha & Kronik, 1984;Nuttin, 2004;Regush, 2003), most authors agree that one's life and motives are constructed in a certain "fi eld", the working space of which can be measured. In dangerous and stressful situations life perspective can decrease to the closest future goals and events, but during periods of calm refl ection it can be broaden to remote moments in the past and future and even go out of life time limits .…”

The Influence of Personality Traits and Resilience on Burnout among Customer Service Representatives in a Call Centre

“…Although, from a trait-like perspective, an individual's personality may be stable over time, it is also dynamic as it characterises individuals' unique adjustment to any given situation (Nicholas 2003). Thus, personality is thought to be related to individuals' appraisal of stressful experiences (Booth-Kewley and Vickers 1994;Brody and Ehrichman 1998;Wu and Clark 2003;Ong and Bergeman 2004;Martin 2006), and may predispose them to high-er or lower levels of tolerance to stress (Schultz and Schultz 1998;Ghazinour et al 2003;Martin 2006;Jaffe-Gill et al 2007). Therefore, personality seems to predispose individuals toward ill health and burnout or to act as a buffer against ill health and burnout (Hochwälder 2006), meaning that a stressful situation can ruin the health of one worker, and have no noticeable effect on a co-worker (Schultz and Schultz 1998).…”