Uses and abuses of the resilience construct: loss, trauma, and health-related adversities.

In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier's archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: The social sciences have no particular claim to the use of the term " resilience. " The word has been in general circulation for centuries and over time has taken on a variety of meanings. In the past several decades, however, resilience has gained currency as a psychological construct, first in the developmental literature on chronic adversity (Luthar, 2003; Masten, 2001) and more recently in the literature on loss, trauma and other forms of acute adversity in adults (Bonanno, 2004). As the construct migrated, from the study of adversity in children to the study of acute events in adults, it was reasonable to anticipate that corresponding changes in the construct's operational definition would be required. Unfortunately, much of the research on resilience in adults has been carried out without consideration of these modifications. As a result, misuses and misunderstandings have proliferated. In the hopes of bringing some clarity to the study of resilient outcomes in adults, I first review three approaches that have suffered from serious conceptual misunderstandings: resilience as a personality characteristic; resilience as the absence of psychopathology; and resilience as a general term to connote average levels of psychological adjustment. Next, I review research that avoids these pitfalls by defining resilience as a stable trajectory of healthy functioning in response to a clearly defined event. I conclude the article by describing a set of methodological criteria to guide future studies of resilience and its predictors. Developmental origins and conceptual migration Much of the original theorizing on psychological resilience came from developmental psychologists, psychiatrists and other mental health professionals working in the 1970s. These pioneering investigators had begun to document the large numbers of children who despite growing up in highly aversive circumstance nonetheless emerged as functional and capable individuals An important feature of the early developmental observations, of crucial significance to understanding conceptual variations in the resilience construct, was that most of the early research focused on chronic forms of adversity, such as corrosive socioeconomic circumstances (e.g., poverty) or long-term abusive relationships. As a result, developmental theorists tended to contextualize resilient outcomes as favorable adjustment over a broad sweep of time (Masten, 2001). A child might struggle for …