The secret of resilience: Personality and developmental factors

Resilience refers to successful adaptation despite adversity, ability to overcome hardships and trauma, developmental competencies or even blossoming in harsh conditions. Abundant research is available on the child-family-and society-related factors that enhance resilience in various hardships including parental mental illness, childhood abuse and major trauma of war and terrorism.  In addition to these explanatory factors, it is urgent to understand processes and dynamic mechanisms that underlie the human resilient capacities.

This presentation focuses, first, on the personality as a precondition of resilience by analysing the role of representations of self and significant others, and attachment and temperament styles. The hypothesis is that a goodness-of-fit between the personality and adversity/trauma characteristics may be the secret of resilience rather than the personality itself. Second, we analyse some socioemotional, psychophysiological and interactional processes that contribute to healthy child and life-span development in adverse conditions.

Evidence is reviewed of basic emotion research (recognition, expression and regulation of emotions), cognitive models (attributions and memory) and biological pathways (phenomenon of neural plasticity and integrative brain functions) . Finally, as the aim of resilience research is to encourage healthy development in adverse conditions, we discuss how interventions and preventions can be based on relevant research on resilience .