Self-focused and other-focused resiliency: Plausible mechanisms linking early family adversity to health problems in college women

Abstract

Objectives: This study examined whether self-focused and other-focused resiliency help explain how early family adversity relates to perceived stress, subjective health, and health behaviors in college women. Participants: Female students (n = 795) participated between October 2009 and May 2010. Methods: Participants completed self-report measures of early family adversity, selffocused (self-esteem, personal growth initiative) and other-focused (perceived social support, gratitude) resiliency, stress, subjective health, and health behaviors. Results: Using structural equation modeling, self-focused resiliency associated with less stress, better subjective health, more sleep, less smoking, and less weekend alcohol consumption. Other-focused resiliency associated with more exercise, greater stress, and more weekend alcohol consumption. Early family adversity was indirectly related to all health outcomes, except smoking, via self-focused and other-focused resiliency. Conclusions: Self-focused and other-focused resiliency represent plausible mechanisms through which early family adversity relates to stress and health in college women. This highlights areas for future research in disease prevention and management. Model postulates that early family adversity negatively impacts biological stress-response systems, emotion processing, and social competence, and these impairments subsequently make it difficult to cope with stress and manage health behaviors. 2 The broad full model also accounts for the potential influence of genetics and family social context, and studies have demonstrated support for the mechanisms theorized by the model to link early family adversity to stress and health behaviors known to contribute to poor health (for a review, see Repetti, Taylor, & Seeman, 2002). As such, the model provides a useful conceptual framework for considering the importance of psychosocial resiliency factors (see Figure 1), which is the focus of the present paper. However, with regard to psychosocial resiliency, the scope of resiliency factors accounted for is limited to emotion processing and social competence, 2 although studies have suggested that additional psychosocial factors may potentially link early family adversity to a variety of health problems. 3 As such, the purpose of this study is to examine whether broad psychosocial resiliency factors (i.e., "self-focused resiliency" and "other-focused resiliency") constitute plausible mechanisms linking early family adversity to health problems facing female college students. 4A theoretical review describing a taxonomy of psychosocial resiliency resources suggests that emotion processing and social competence may reflect just one dimension (i.e., behavioral and cognitive skills) of resources a person has available to them when they experience stress. focused (e.g., self-esteem 5,6 ) and other-focused resiliency (e.g., perceived social support 7-9 ) and health in adulthood, and that early family adversity may disrupt the development of these resources (e.g., self-esteem;...

The Efficacy of a Resilience Intervention Among Diverse, At-Risk, College Athletes: A Mixed-Methods Study

“…Students' ability to cope successfully when faced with the academic, social, and financial stressors of college life has a major impact on both their future health and academic success (Coleman, Zawadzki, Heron, Lenny, & Smyth, 2016). Adaptive resilience interventions during the challenging time of transition to college may lower stress, improve emotional awareness, increase resilience, and foster a sense of belonging, thus facilitating the attributes needed for improved health, academic engagement, and athletic success.…”

Health Risk Behaviors and Self-Esteem Among College Students: Systematic Review of Quantitative Studies

“…Statistical Association Among the six studies, three found a significant association [50,61,78]. All the significant associations were negative.…”

“…Among the 16 studies that found no association [39, 40, 46-50, 52-55, 57, 58, 60-62], 4 studies investigated the association with dimensional measures of self-esteem (i.e., contingent self-esteem, implicit self-esteem and decisional selfesteem) [39,40,48,62] and 2 were based on female participants [50,53]. One study found an association with implicit self-esteem but not with explicit self-esteem [59].…”

“…One study included more than 100 participants [76], and the others included between 212 and 830 participants. Self-esteem was evaluated exclusively by a global self-esteem measure, with eight studies using the RSE scale [46,50,52,61,[75][76][77][78]. Most of the studies (n = 6) included undergraduate students or restricted age groups of students (18-25 years) [49-52, 75, 76] and two studies included exclusively female students [50,75].…”

“…Half of the studies used multivariate analysis (n = 5, i.e., sex, age, personality, stress, other healthbehavior) [49,51,[75][76][77]. The studies assessed smoking by two types of measurement: number of cigarettes smoked (mostly in the past month) for six studies [46,49,50,52,61,78] or smoking status with different definitions for four studies (hookah use once in the year, smoked at least one cigarette in the past month, and more than 100 times in their life or at least one cigarette per day in the past month) [51,[75][76][77]. No study reported having performed a sample size analysis to ensure statistical power.…”