Resilience: Life Events, Trajectories and The Brain

Life events and traumatic stress challenge mental health and resilience. Resilience has been defined as either characteristic of the individual or as a dynamic cultural pluralistic interactional process. Over the past two decades, the concept of resilience has significantly changed from a trait-oriented to a dynamic outcome and process-oriented approach which draws on concepts of trans-diagnostic psychiatry, developmental psychology, emotion research, and cognitive neuroscience. Accordingly, we understand resilience as a dynamic interactional process which includes distal and proximal protective and risk factors/mechanisms. Protective, distal resilience factors refer to those factors which protect e.g. refugees from the potential negative effect of pre-, and during flight factors and proximal factors relate to post-flight factors. Those factors and mechanisms can be either personal (e.g., education, neural mechanisms) or ecological (e.g., social cohesion, social support, humiliation, restricted education/economic opportunities). This ecological concept has great potential for the development of novel intervention strategies.

In this Research Topic, we aim to provide knowledge on the most recent theories of resilience and to provide data based on empirical studies. Additionally, we will investigate measurement possibilities and provide examples for cultural, biological and developmental levels of measurement.