Commentary
Uses and abuses of the resilience construct: Loss, trauma, and health-related adversities

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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 (Garmezy, 1991, Murphy and Moriarty, 1976, Rutter, 1979, Werner, 1995).

Resilience is not a personality variable

Although developmental researchers had documented the importance of personality factors in resilient outcomes (e.g., Kim-Cohen, Moffitt, Caspi, & Taylor, 2004), interest in personality traits expanded noticeably as the study of resilience migrated to adult trauma research. Personality variables show at least some malleability across the lifespan. However, these changes appear to be less pronounced in adulthood (McCrae et al., 2000, Roberts et al., 2006), thus suggesting that personality may be

The resilience criteria

Given the misuses and misunderstandings about resilience in the context of adult adversity, how then should the construct be measured? It stands to reason that although resilience is often described as a process, the only logical way to understand that process requires that there is a clearly referenced adversity and a clear, conceptually defensible outcome in response to that adversity (Bonanno, 2004, Luthar et al., 2000). Each of the paradigms I described above fails in some way to satisfy

Moving forward

Given the surge of interest in resilient predictors and outcomes, it is potentially of interest to explore these constructs in any data set available. Qualitative studies of putatively resilient samples, for example, provide a valuable source of new ideas and information, especially in populations that have not yet benefited from systematic study (e.g., Rajkumar et al., 2008, Zraly and Nyirazinyoye, 2010). However, as the criteria outlined above attest, systematic and empirical analyses of

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