Psychological resilience allows one to cope successfully with adversities occurring during stressful periods, which may otherwise trigger mental illness. Recent models suggest that inhibitory control (IC), the executive control function which supports our goal-directed behavior and regulates our emotional response, may underlie resilience. However, the ways in which this is manifested during stressful situations in real life is still unclear. Here, we examined the relationship between IC, psychological resilience, psychological distress, and anxiety among 138 female and male participants in a stressful situation: during their initial combat training in the military. Using a mobile app, we assessed IC using emotional and non-emotional variations of the Go/No-Go task. Psychological resilience, psychological distress, and anxiety were assessed using mobile versions of self-report questionnaires. We found that psychological resilience is significantly correlated with non-emotional IC (r = 0.24, p < 0.005), but not with emotional IC; whereas, psychological distress and anxiety are correlated with emotional IC (r = −0.253, p < 0.005 and r = −0.224, p < 0.01, for psychological distress and anxiety, respectively), but not with non-emotional IC. A regression model predicting emotional IC confirmed non-emotional IC and distress as unique contributors to the variance, but not psychological distress. In addition, associations between psychological distress and emotional IC were found only for female participants. Collectively, the results clarify the link between IC, resilience, and mental health in real-life stressful situations, showing separate mechanisms of IC involved in resilience on the one hand, and mental health on the other hand. These results have implications for building mobile resilience interventions for youth and young adults facing stressful situations.

Multiple internal factors, such as psychological resilience and mental health status, have been shown to contribute to overall quality of life (QoL). However, very few studies to date have examined how these factors contribute to QoL of youth and young adults in a stressful situation. Here, we studied the contribution of these factors, as well as of ecological momentary mood assessment, to QoL of young army recruits during their Basic Training Combat (BCT). To this end, we collected data from 156 male and female soldiers in a mixed-gender unit in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Using a mobile app installed on participants' phones, participants provided self-reports regarding their mental health status and psychological resilience at baseline, and QoL 2 weeks later. Momentary mood reporting was further collected during the 2-week interval period using a daily self-report mood scale (IMS-12). Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to examine the interrelationships among the study variables based on a hypothesized model. We found that a model with all factors (gender, resilience, mental health status and momentary mood) provided a good fit for the data based on its fit indices [χ2(38) = 47.506, p = 0.139, CFI = 0.979, NFI = 0.910, RMSEA = 0.040, TLI = 0.964]. However, the only direct contributors to QoL were gender and momentary mood, accounting together for 61.5% of the variance of QoL. Psychological resilience and mental health status contributed to QoL only indirectly, through their associations with momentary mood. Collectively, these results highlight the importance of ecological momentary assessment of mental-health related factors such as mood to the prediction of QoL in young adults under stress. These findings may have broader implications for monitoring and improvement of well-being in young healthy populations as well as in clinical ones.

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BACKGROUND Psychological resilience, one’s ability to adapt to adversity or life stressors, is hypothesized to rely on intact mechanisms of cognitive control (CC), i.e., the mental abilities that underlie our goal-directed behavior. These CC mechanisms may further help with emotion regulation during stressful periods. However, CC abilities may fluctuate, and there is no research to date on the daily fluctuations of CC and mood in relation to psychological resilience. OBJECTIVE The goal of the current study was to examine the everyday association between inhibitory control (IC), an integral part of CC, and daily mood in relation to psychological resilience in young adults in a stressful situation. METHODS Data was collected from 156 male and female soldiers in a mixed-gender unit of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Participants reported their resilience at baseline. Then, during a 2-week period, participants filled out a short momentary mood assessment and completed a short IC assessment (a Go-NoGo task; GNG) twice/day using a mobile app installed on their phones. A hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was applied to examine the association between momentary IC and mood for each participant. RESULTS A total of 1,153 assessment points (Mean [M] = 7.49, standard deviation [SD] = 2.95) were completed by participants, for an overall compliance rate of 57.6%. The HLM analysis showed that psychological resilience at baseline moderated the relationship between IC and mood, such that better IC was associated with better mood only for those with higher, but not lower, levers of self-reported psychological resilience at baseline. This association was present only for female, but not for male, participants in our sample. CONCLUSIONS To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to demonstrate that psychological resilience is manifested in the everyday association between inhibitory control and mood. Hence, these findings provide an ecological validation for the definition of resilience, as measured in young adults during a stressful life period. These results therefore lend important support to cognitive models of resilience and may have significant contribution to our understanding of resilient behavior in real life and to potential ecological interventions designed to improve resilience. CLINICALTRIAL MOH_2018-06-13_002451