Social Behavior as a Transdiagnostic Marker of Resilience

Abstract

The recent shift from psychopathology to resilience and from diagnosis to functioning requires the construction of transdiagnostic markers of adaptation. This review describes a model of resilience that is based on the neurobiology of affiliation and the initial condition of mammals that mature in the context of the mother's body and social behavior. The model proposes three tenets of resilience—plasticity, sociality, and meaning—and argues that coordinated social behavior stands at the core sustaining resilience. Two lines in the maturation of coordinated social behavior are charted, across animal evolution and throughout human development, culminating in the mature human reciprocity of empathy, mutuality, and perspective-taking. Cumulative evidence across ages and clinical conditions and based on our behavioral coding system demonstrates that social reciprocity, defined by plasticity at the individual, dyadic, and group levels, denotes resilience, whereas the two poles of disengagement/avoidance and intrusion/rigidity characterize specific psychopathologies, each with a distinct behavioral signature. Attention to developmentally sensitive markers and to the dimension of meaning in human sociality may open new, behavior-based pathways to resilience. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, Volume 17 is May 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Social dialogue triggers biobehavioral synchrony of partners' endocrine response via sex-specific, hormone-specific, attachment-specific mechanisms

“…Such mutual-influences are consistent with the formulations of the bio-behavioral synchrony model, which describes the coordination between the physiological and behavioral processes of social partners during moments of social contact 2 , 7 . Biobehavioral synchrony is theorized to have played an important role in the evolution of humans' social abilities by facilitating mindreading and communicative language and is thought to sustain human resilience, attachment, and the integration of individuals into social group 37 . Our data highlight several important findings that may shed further light on processes of biobehavioral synchrony across multiple endocrine systems as mediated by social coordination.…”

From mothers to children and back: Bidirectional processes in the cross‐generational transmission of anxiety from early childhood to early adolescence

“…In the current study, we focused on maternal sensitivity as the key indicator of parenting quality. Maternal sensitivity is the central behavioral construct utilized in observational studies of the parent‐child relationship, shows individual stability from infancy to adolescence, and has shown longitudinal associations with secure attachment and adaptive social‐emotional development (Feldman, 2007, 2021; van IJzendoorn et al, 1995). Maternal sensitivity may be compromised under various risk conditions related to maternal and contextual stress (Campbell et al, 2007; Feldman & Vengrober, 2011; Ulmer‐Yaniv, Djalovski, Yirmiya, Halevi, Zagoory‐Sharon, Feldman 2017), and the decrease in maternal sensitivity has shown to mediate the effects of harsh rearing environments on child outcomes (Bouvette‐Turcot et al, 2017; Farrell et al, 2017).…”

Assessing Unpredictability in Caregiver-Child Relationships: Insights from Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives

“…Dynamic systems theory (DST) extends Bronfenbrenner's hierarchy of nested systems, highlighting the importance of temporal processes in the organization and predictability across these systems (Hollenstein, 2007;Lewis, 2011). A guiding premise of this work is that moment-to-moment interactions and biobehavioral signals self-organize into flexible but predictable patterns, fostering behavioral and homeostatic rhythms that support the development of emotional and cognitive circuitry (Davis et al, 2017;DePasquale, 2020;Feldman, 2021).…”