User:Haleymck/Psychological resilience

Early resilience research conceptualised the construct as a personality trait permitting positive outcomes under extreme hardship. Resilience research originated in two fields: traumatology (looking at adults) and developmental psychology (looking at children and youth). Early resilience research with adults focused on identifying what led some individuals to avoid traumatic stress. In developmental psychology, researchers aimed to identify personal qualities (e.g., self-esteem) differentiating children who had adapted positively to socioeconomic disadvantage, abuse or neglect and catastrophic life events, from children showing comparatively poorer outcomes (Luthar, Cicchetti and Becker, 2000). These classic longitudinal studies of large cohorts of disadvantaged children revolutionised psychology and pioneered a methodological paradigm for resilience research. Werner and Smith, in their seminal Kauai Longitudinal Study with a cohort of participants born in Hawaii in 1955, noted the ‘resiliency’ of some children and shifted focus towards analysing how these children benefited from family support, good coping and a strong sense of values (Werner and Smith, 1982). Such studies have since identified key individual and family-level attributes predicting resilience among high-risk children, which are relatively consistent across ethnic groups and socio-political contexts (Werner and Smith, 2001).

The study of resilience began when researchers looked into the traumatology and developmental psychology fields.

'''Werner and Smith also focused on how these children became so resilient by measuring many factors including the support these children received from their families. (Check Wikipedia article because this one mentions a Werner and Smith, however original article only mentions Werner as the sole researcher)'''


 * Increasingly, researchers focused on identifying the characteristics of individuals, particularly young people, who thrived while living in difficult circumstances, such as poverty and parental mental illness (Garmezy, 1991; Rutter, 1990; Werner & Smith, 1992). Examples of such qualities were: an easy temperament, good self-esteem, planning skills, and a supportive environment inside and outside the family. Thus, the thrust of early research examining resilience was the search for factors that protect an individual from the stressors they encounter, and distinguish between those who adapt to the circumstances and those who yield to the demands.

Some characteristics of psychological resilience include: an easy temperament, good self-esteem, planning skills, and a supportive environment inside and outside of the family.


 * When used in relation to humans, numerous definitions of resilience have been proposed in the psychology research literature. The specific nature of a definition is often influenced by the historical and sociocultural context within which the research was conducted, the researchers’ conceptual proclivities, and the population sampled. Examples of some of the most commonly cited definitions of resilience are presented in Table 1. Despite the construct being operationalized in a variety of ways, most definitions are based around two core concepts: adversity and positive adaptation.

Despite numerous definitions of psychological resilience, most of these definitions center around two concepts: adversity and positive adaptation.


 * Seeking social support as a means of coping with adversity has been categorized as a problem-focused coping strategy (Samios et al., 2020) and has been found to effectively reduce stress. Mounting evidence has strongly linked adequate support from managers, co-workers, family and friends with positive mental health outcomes for both health care and non-health care professionals during stressful and traumatic events such as calamities, accidents, disasters and disease outbreaks
 * Psychological resilience, like social support, has long been considered a protective factor against the adverse psychological effects of stressful or traumatic situations (Hart et al., 2014). In the context of pandemic, a wide range of evidence has demonstrated that resilient health care workers are more likely to rebound effectively and endure the pandemic-associated psychological burden than non-resilient health care workers

During the pandemic, nurses who received social support from their coworkers and family were able to rebound from psychological burden than their coworkers who did not.

'''In response to my peer review I have added information from two new articles. The first two bullet points can be used in the intro, so that it has more information on psychological resilience. I have not been focused on the criticisms of psychological resilience, however the article I used for the first two bullet points can add to the part where the criticism section speaks about the different psychological theories. There's so many to look at so I plan on only using one or two as examples. Finally, I found an article about social support as it relates to health care workers and the pandemic. I am going to include the last bullet point and make a paragraph about how the pandemic has affected psychological resilience of health care workers (with and without social support) so that I add something that is relevant for this day and time. I am continuing to look up articles that include criticisms about psych resilience, they're hard to come by! I also added cites so that it is easy to look at the articles I pulled this information from (I forgot to add them last time!).'''