REVIEW - The Science of Resilience

The Science of Resilience

Posted: Huffington Post  09/13/2012 3:56 pm

Steven M. Southwick 

Professor of Psychiatry, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and Resilience, Yale Medical School

For nearly twenty years my colleagues and I studied post-traumatic stress disorder and the profound negative psychological, social, and neurobiological impact of traumas such as child abuse, natural disasters, physical and sexual abuse, and combat. We often wondered why some survivors succeeded in overcoming adversity, bouncing back, and continuing on with purposeful lives, while others didn't. Some individuals were clearly more resilient than others.

The American Psychological Association defines resilience as "the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or even significant sources of threat." To answer our question, we turned to three groups of highly resilience individuals: former Vietnam prisoners of war, Special Forces instructors, and civilian men and women who had endured and even thrived after surviving harrowing traumas.
In our book, Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life's Greatest Challenges, Dennis Charney M.D. and I systematically address the topic of resilience. Because resilience is the complex product of genetic, psychological, biological, social and spiritual factors, we investigate resilience from multiple scientific perspectives. We synthesize the latest scientific and popular literature on the topic, describe our own psychological and neurobiological research on resilience, and quote from our in-depth interviews with a large number of highly resilient people.

When we began our study, we assumed that resilience was rare and resilient people were somehow special, perhaps genetically gifted. It turns out, we were wrong. Resilience is common and can be witnessed all around us. Even better, we learned that everyone can learn and train to be more resilient. The key involves knowing how to harness stress and use it to our advantage. After all, stress is necessary for growth. Without it the mind and body weaken and atrophy. 

Let's take a quick look at some genetic and biological factors that have been associated with resilience. While no one gene or gene variation explains resilience, genetic factors do play an important role in determining how an individual responds to stress and trauma. For example, DNA studies have found that polymorphisms (i.e., variations) of genes that regulate the sympathetic nervous system, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, and the serotonin system partially determine whether our biological response to stress is too robust, too muted, or within a range that is optimal for adaptive functioning. In addition, studies of identical twins, where one twin has been exposed to a traumatic stressor such as combat but the other twin has not, have estimated an overall heritability of posttraumatic stress disorder ranging from 32-38%. This means that genes are important but that they are only part of the story.  MORE