Psychological Resilience in Response to Adverse Experiences

Abstract

In the field of developmental psychology, resilience is broadly understood as positive adaptation despite exposure to adversity. The concept provides an explanation for the wide variability in mental health outcomes observed in children exposed to adverse experiences. Although resilience has become an important and influential concept in the field, some fundamental questions remain, such as how it should be defined and operationalized and what the specific processes are that lead to positive mental health outcomes in some children but not others. These questions are particularly relevant in the context of the global refugee crisis to understand and promote resilience in children exposed to war and displacement. In this chapter the authors argue that a holistic view is required to understand resilience and provide a model integrating five important psychological concepts. The five components of our integrated model of resilience suggest that (a) development is nested within multiple psychosocial and bio-ecological systems; (b) individual differences in environmental sensitivity influence the individual response to both negative and positive aspects of the environment; (c) resilience mechanisms can be investigated across multiple levels of analysis; (d) the conceptualization of positive adaptation should consider multiple outcome dimensions; and (e) resilience represents a developmental process that needs to be examined longitudinally. After presenting this model, the authors review empirical studies in relation to each of these five components and suggest how they can be further applied in the study of resilience to war and displacement in refugee children.

Predictors of psychological risk and resilience among Syrian refugee children

“…Previous research in refugee populations has identified a range of factors across individual and social systems that predict risk and resilience (Popham, McEwen, & Pluess, 2021; Scharpf et al., 2021). For example, different coping strategies show adaptive or maladaptive functions (Khamis, 2019a), while parenting can either buffer or exacerbate the impact of adversity on children's mental health (Bryant et al., 2018; Khamis, 2019a).…”

The dynamic nature of refugee children's resilience: a cohort study of Syrian refugees in Lebanon

“…manifested resilience; Miller-Graff 2020). However, the process of adapting to adversity can take different trajectories (Popham et al ., 2021). Children struggling at one timepoint may recover, while continuing accumulation of stressors may cause a child originally doing well to deteriorate (Müller et al ., 2019).…”

Pathways to resilience and pathways to flourishing: Examining the added-value of multisystem research and intervention in contexts of war and forced displacement

“…In terms of mental health trajectories, the science of resilience has already clarified how modeling individuallevel health outcomes over time can help identify pathways to resilience, resistance, or posttraumatic growth; this is often done, however, with reference to acute-onset trauma such as a disaster or terrorist attack (Bonanno et al, 2015;Masten & Narayan, 2012). In protracted or post-conflict settings, pathways to mental health and resilience can be more complex to ascertain, due to the interplay of ongoing and past adversities (Betancourt et al, 2013;Tol et al, 2013), potential differences in environmental sensitivity affecting responses to war exposure (Popham et al, 2021), and developmental cascades across multiple, nested systems providing context to life-course experiences (Masten and Cicchetti, 2010). Recent work now pays careful attention to the role of family environments in examining changes in child mental health over time (Popham et al, 2022).…”