ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Neuroimaging
Sec. Neuroimaging Meta-Analyses
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnimg.2025.1487888
Neuroimaging correlates of psychological resilience: an Open Science systematic review and metaanalysis
Provisionally accepted
- University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock, United States
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While risk factors have been identified for numerous psychiatric disorders, many individuals exposed to these risk factors do not develop psychopathology. A growing neuroimaging literature has sought to find structural and functional brain features that confer psychological resilience against developing psychiatric disorders. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies associated with psychological resilience. Searches of Pubmed, Embase, Web of Science and PsychInfo yielded 2,653 potentially relevant articles published 2000-2021. Of these, we identified 154 human neuroimaging articles which provided anatomical coordinates of regions promoting resilience against psychiatric disorders including PTSD (44% of articles), schizophrenia (18%), major depressive disorder (14%) and bipolar disorder (12%).Meta-analysis conducted in GingerALE identified three regions as promoting psychological resilience across disorders (cluster-level FWE p<0.05): left amygdala, right amygdala, and anterior cingulate. We additionally introduce a novel framework for conducting systematic reviews and meta-analyses that is compliant with best practices of Open Science: our publicly viewable systematic review was curated and annotated using the open-source reference manager Zotero, with customizable Python scripts for extracting curated data for metaanalyses. Our methodological pipeline not only permits independent replication of our findings but also supports customization for future neuroimaging meta-analyses.
Keywords: psychological resilience, psychiatric disorders, Meta-analysis, Neuroimaging, Amygdala, anterior cingulate
Received: 28 Aug 2024; Accepted: 21 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Kuehn, Calvert and James. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: George Andrew James, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock, United States
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