What is resilience: an affiliative neuroscience approach

Abstract

Resilience – a key topic in clinical science and practice – still lacks a clear conceptualization that integrates its evolutionary and human‐specific features, refrains from exclusive focus on fear physiology, incorporates a developmental approach, and, most importantly, is not based on the negation (i.e., absence of symptoms following trauma). Building on the initial condition of mammals, whose brain matures in the context of the mother's body and caregiving behavior, we argue that systems and processes that participate in tuning the brain to the social ecology and adapting to its hardships mark the construct of resilience. These include the oxytocin system, the affiliative brain, and biobehavioral synchrony, all characterized by great flexibility across phylogenesis and ontogenesis. Three core features of resilience are outlined: plasticity, sociality and meaning. Mechanisms of sociality by which coordinated action supports diversity, endurance and adaptation are described across animal evolution. Humans' biobehavioral synchrony matures from maternal attuned behavior in the postpartum to adult‐adult relationships of empathy, perspective‐taking and intimacy, and extends from the mother‐child relationship to other affiliative bonds throughout life, charting a fundamental trajectory in the development of resilience. Findings from three high‐risk cohorts, each tapping a distinct disruption to maternal‐infant bonding (prematurity, maternal depression, and early life stress/trauma), and followed from birth to adolescence/young adulthood, demonstrate how components of the neurobiology of affiliation confer resilience and uniquely shape the social brain.

Concordance in parent and offspring cortico-basal ganglia white matter connectivity varies by parental history of major depressive disorder and early parental care

“…One of the central pillars of human social development is the ability to be attuned to the social cues of others, including sharing others’ emotions and the ability to take into account others’ perspectives and thoughts, which is first experienced and formed in the context of early parent-child relationship and represented at physiological levels (Gordon et al , 2020a, b; Decety, 2015 ). Such affective, behavioral and physiological attunements protect individuals from stressful experiences, unpredictable environment and from developing psychopathology from infancy to elderly ( Barton et al, 2013 ; Stern et al , 1985 ; Tops et al , 2014 ; Feldman, 2020 ).…”

The Disproportionate Burden of the COVID-19 Pandemic Among Pregnant Black Women

“…Our understanding of the short- and long-term effects of the pandemic on pregnant women and their offspring can also be advanced by exploring resilience, the capacity of individuals to cope with difficult and stressful situations ( Feldman, 2020 ; Rutter, 2006 ; Ungar and Theron, 2020 ). Recent advances in the assessment of resilience include a brief, validated battery that measures multiple parameters of resilience in large-scale studies ( Moore et al, 2020 ).…”

Mother Brain is Wired for Social Moments

“…Allostasis describes the anticipatory regulatory process by which the brain, based on a hypothalamic clock that underpins rest-activity cycles in every tissue of the body, allocates resources to the various bodily functions before physiological systems become disregulated (Schulkin and Sterling, 2019). Within the motherinfant bond, allostasis allows the mother to satisfy the infant's needs before they arise and this is among the main mechanisms by which the maternal mature brain externally regulates the infant's immature brain across mammalian species (Feldman, 2020;Hofer, 1987). The insula serves as a center of allostasis; its connectivity to targets within the body increases attention to bodily cues and its connection to the hypothalamus and von Economo neurons, which allow for rapid communication, make the insula particularly sensitive to temporal regularities.…”

“…Albeit brief, these precious social moments expose mothers and infants to massive amounts of social inputs, require a temporally-fitted pattern to regulate the high arousal, and carry profound effects on infant development (Tronick, 1989). Longitudinal studies indicate that mother-infant synchrony builds dyad-specific patterns that maintain temporal consistency from infancy to adolescence and young adulthood (Feldman, 2010;Ulmer-Yaniv et al, 2020) and predict improved social-emotional outcomes (Feldman, 2020;Halevi et al, 2017). Moreover, activation of the parent's "caregiving network" in the first months of parenting shapes child socioemotional competencies as mediated by parent-infant synchrony and parental oxytocin (OT) levels (Abraham et al, 2018(Abraham et al, , 2016Kim et al, 2015).…”