Relationship of resilience to personality, coping, and psychiatric symptoms in young adults

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Abstract

Developing a comprehensive understanding of resilience across the lifespan is potentially important for mental health promotion, yet resilience has been vastly understudied compared to disease and vulnerability. The present study investigated the relationship of resilience to personality traits, coping styles, and psychiatric symptoms in a sample of college students. Measures included the Connor–Davidson Resilience Scale, NEO Five Factor Inventory, Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations, and Brief Symptom Inventory. Results supported hypotheses regarding the relationship of resilience to personality dimensions and coping styles. Resilience was negatively associated with neuroticism, and positively related to extraversion and conscientiousness. Coping styles also predicted variance in resilience above and beyond the contributions of these personality traits. Task-oriented coping was positively related to resilience, and mediated the relationship between conscientiousness and resilience. Emotion-oriented coping was associated with low resilience. Finally, resilience was shown to moderate the relationship between a form of childhood maltreatment (emotional neglect) and current psychiatric symptoms. These results augment the literature that seeks to better define resilience and provide evidence for the construct validity of the Connor–Davidson Resilience Scale.

Introduction

Resilience and protective factors are the positive counterparts to both vulnerability, which denotes an individual's susceptibility to a disorder, and risk factors, which are biological or psychological hazards that increase the likelihood of a negative developmental outcome in a group of people.” (Werner & Smith, 1992, p. 3).

Developmental psychologists have long been interested in the construct of resilience, which has been broadly defined as “a dynamic process wherein individuals display positive adaptation despite experiences of significant adversity or trauma” (Luthar & Cicchetti, 2000, p. 858). Resilience is often conceptualized as existing along a continuum with vulnerability and implies a resistance to psychopathology, though not total invulnerability to the development of psychiatric disorder (Ingram & Price, 2001). Early theories of resilience emphasized identification of child characteristics associated with positive outcomes in the face of adversity (Rutter, 1985; Werner, 1984). This line of research later expanded to include external protective factors that may promote resilience, such as effective schools and relationships with supportive adults (Luthar, Cicchetti, & Becker, 2000). Current theories view resilience as a multidimensional construct, which includes constitutional variables like temperament and personality, in addition to specific skills (e.g. active problem-solving) that allow individuals to cope well with traumatic life events.

Though the first wave of resilience research focused on characteristics of resilient individuals, a second wave of research in this area has focused more on understanding the process through which individuals are able to successfully adapt, or “bounce back” from stress or trauma. Resilience is seen as more than simple recovery from insult (Bonanno, 2004), rather it can be defined as positive growth or adaptation following periods of homeostatic disruption (Richardson, 2002). Although positive adaptation in response to extreme adversity was originally thought to characterize extraordinary individuals, more recent research suggests that resilience is relatively common among children and adolescents exposed to disadvantage, trauma, and adversity (Masten, 2001). The majority of resilience research has been conducted with these younger populations, and little is known about how resilience operates in adulthood.

This gap in the resilience literature is particularly troubling, since we know that despite high levels of exposure to potentially-traumatic events during their lifetimes (Kessler, Sonnega, Bromet, Hughes, & Nelson, 1995) most adults do not go on to develop severe distress or psychopathology. Bonanno (2004) argues that because most research into trauma and loss has only included treatment-seeking populations, we continue to know very little about the process of resilient adaptation in adulthood. He suggests that in adults resilience should be conceptualized as the ability to maintain relatively healthy and stable levels of physical and psychological functioning in the wake of traumatic experiences. Though there is little research in this area, Bonanno proposes that several different paths may lead to resilience in adulthood, and that resilient adaptation may be far more common than previously believed.

Work like Bonanno's (2004) calls attention to the fact that although resilience has been studied extensively by developmental researchers, it has received little attention in the psychiatry and psychopathology literature due to a longstanding focus on disease and pathology. However, many authors have advocated a new approach to psychopathology research that includes a focus on positive adaptation in response to stress. For example, a developmental psychopathology perspective emphasizes the need to study the mechanisms and processes that lead to positive adaptation along with those leading to pathology in order to enhance our understanding of both normal and abnormal development (Cicchetti & Cohen, 1995). Developmental psychopathologists advocate an integrated multidisciplinary approach to assessment, diagnosis, and intervention that places equal emphasis on competencies and protective factors.

Similarly, proponents of the positive psychology movement advocate a broader view of human experience that includes an understanding of individual strengths, talents, and virtues. Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000) argue that in the last several decades the field of psychology has focused almost exclusively on understanding human functioning within a disease-focused medical model. Although psychologists have made great strides in understanding the biological, social, and environmental processes and contexts for pathology, many other human experiences have been neglected. In contrast, positive psychology encourages application of the scientific method to the full complexity of human behavior, including positive adaptation and growth. This approach is consistent with what has been termed the postmodern or new-science perspective, which also recommends a shift away from problem-oriented approaches to those focusing on strengths that allow individuals to survive and grow even in the face of adversity (Richardson, 2002).

Only recently have clinical researchers taken up the call to engage in research to understand positive adaptation despite adversity. For example, Charney (2004) has developed a model of the psychobiological systems implicated in resilient adaptation following acute stress. Building on previous models of the neural underpinnings of reward, motivation, fear conditioning, and social behavior, he proposes an integrative model of resilience and vulnerability that incorporates several brain regions and a number of neurochemical, neuropeptide, and hormonal mediators of the acute stress response. This type of theoretical model may help to balance the overwhelming focus on stress-related psychopathology that has thus far characterized this research domain. Tsuang (2000) has also suggested that research into the factors that promote resilience may have important clinical implications, particularly for preventive interventions. He notes that future molecular genetic studies may help to uncover the mechanisms underlying resilience, which could inform both psychological and pharmacological treatments.

As psychopathology researchers and clinicians become more interested in assessing resilience and understanding how it operates in the promotion and maintenance of mental health there is an increasing need for high quality measures of the construct. However, to date there are few well-validated measures of resilience for use with adult populations. To address this issue Connor and Davidson (2003) developed a new self-report instrument, the Connor–Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC). This measure was designed with the dual goals of establishing norms for resilience in normal and clinical samples and of assessing the extent to which resilience scores change in response to treatment. The CD-RISC is made up of items reflecting several aspects of resilience including a sense of personal competence, tolerance of negative affect, positive acceptance of change, trust in one's instincts, sense of social support, spiritual faith, and an action-oriented approach to problem solving. Initial work suggests that the CD-RISC is a promising measure for use with adult psychiatric and normal populations (Connor & Davidson, 2003; Connor, Davidson, & Lee, 2003). Efforts to strengthen the psychometric properties of the CD-RISC may help this instrument to become the “gold standard” self-report measure for assessing resilience in adult populations. The existence of a well-validated resilience scale may also encourage researchers and clinicians to include this important construct in their assessment batteries along with more traditional measures of psychiatric morbidity.

The present study sought to enhance understanding of the relationship of resilience in young adulthood to personality traits, coping styles, and psychiatric symptoms. First, we predicted that resilience would demonstrate meaningful relationships to Costa and McCrae's (1992) five-factor model personality constructs. We hypothesized that resilience would have a strong negative relationship with neuroticism, as this trait captures vulnerability to negative emotions and has been shown to relate strongly to anxiety and depression (Bienvenu & Stein, 2003; Brown, Chorpita, & Barlow, 1998; Costa & McCrae, 1992). In contrast, we predicted that resilience would have a strong positive relationship with extraversion, because extraverted people tend to experience more positive emotions, form attachments to others easily, and seek out social interaction (Costa & McCrae, 1992). Both positive emotions and social support have been linked to resilience (Bonanno, 2004; Luthar et al., 2000; Tugade & Fredrickson, 2004). In addition, we predicted that resilience would have a moderately positive relationship to conscientiousness, mainly because highly conscientious persons would be more likely to have strong self-efficacy and would take an active problem-solving approach to dealing with stress. Task-oriented coping has been shown to be a generally adaptive manner of dealing with stress, particularly when the stressor is controllable (Penley, Tomaka, & Wiebe, 2002; Zeidner & Saklofske, 1996).

Resilience and coping are related constructs, but coping refers to the set of cognitive and behavioral strategies used by an individual to manage the demands of stressful situations (Folkman & Moskowitz, 2004), whereas resilience refers to adaptive outcomes in the face of adversity. We predicted that in addition to broad personality traits, coping styles would contribute to resilience. Because coping theorists generally emphasize the positive impact of task-oriented coping and negative impact of emotion-oriented coping on adaptive outcomes (Zeidner & Saklofske, 1996), we predicted that task-oriented coping would be positively related to resilience and emotion-oriented coping would be negatively related to resilience.

A secondary purpose of the study was to investigate the construct validity of the CD-RISC and to evaluate its suitability as a broad measure of resilience in adulthood. Testing the relationships of the CD-RISC to personality and coping measures would help to establish the convergent and discriminant validity of the CD-RISC. However, we also felt that it was important that this measure capture the “essence” of resilience; namely, the capacity to rebound from stress effectively and to attain good functioning despite adversity. Therefore, we tested the moderating effects of resilience on the relationship between childhood maltreatment and later psychiatric symptoms. We predicted that resilience (as measured by the CD-RISC) would moderate the relationship between retrospective reports of childhood trauma and current psychiatric symptoms. Individuals endorsing relatively high levels of childhood trauma and low levels of resilience were expected to manifest high levels of current psychiatric symptoms. In contrast, individuals reporting high levels of childhood trauma in combination with high resilience were expected to manifest low levels of current psychiatric symptoms.

Section snippets

Participants

Participants were 132 undergraduates from San Diego State University (SDSU) who elected to complete studies for course credit in Fall 2003 and Spring 2004. These studies were approved by the Institutional Review Boards at SDSU and University of California, San Diego. Females comprised the majority of the sample (72.0%), and the mean age was 18.87 years (SD=1.55). Participants self-identified as Caucasian (60.6%), Hispanic (11.4%), Filipino (10.6%), Asian American (12.1%), African American

Results

The following results are presented: (1) absolute and relative strength of correlations between resilience and the “Big Five” factors of personality; (2) contributions of personality and coping styles to the prediction of resilience; and (3) the moderating effect of resilience on the relationship between childhood maltreatment and current psychiatric symptoms.

Discussion

The current study evaluated hypotheses about the relationship of resilience to personality traits, coping, and psychiatric symptoms. The analyses also inherently tested the construct validity of the CD-RISC, a relatively new measure of resilience that can be administered to adults. Results were consistent with study hypotheses in that the self-report measure of resilience demonstrated meaningful relationships with well-established personality constructs and measures of coping, trauma, and

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Jonathan Davidson and Kathryn Connor for their comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. We also thank Shadha Hami, Teresa Marcotte, and Carla Hitchcock for coordinating data collection and management. This study was supported in part by NIH Grant MH64122 (Murray B. Stein, M.D., M.P.H.). The first author is supported by NIMH Grant T32 MH 18399-19.

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