Adapting to life's slings and arrows: Individual difference in resilience when recovering from an anticipated threat.

In response to highly negative events, people are deemed resilient if they maintain psychological stability and experience fewer mental health problems (Bonanno, Wortman, & Nesse, 2004; Fredrickson, Tugade, Waugh, & Larkin, 2003), and more positive emotions (Fredrickson et al., 2003; Folkman & Moskowitz, 2000). In my dissertation, I aim to investigate how trait resilience (as measured by the ER89; Block & Kremen, 1996) might influence recovery from negative events that are anticipated but do not in fact occur. In all studies, participants received cues that signaled an upcoming picture. The 'safety cue' signaled that the picture would be neutral. The 'threat cue' signaled that the next picture could be either aversive or neutral. My first hypothesis was that resilient people would show quicker/more complete recovery than nonresilient people in response to the neutral picture that could have been aversive (relief). Studies 1 and 3 tested and supported this hypothesis. In Study 1, a neuroimaging study in which participants' brain activation was measured, resilient participants showed less ventrolateral prefrontal cortex activation (VLPFC), a region associated with emotion regulation, in response to this better-than-expected neutral picture. In study 3, participants rated their affect continuously throughout the task, and resilient participants exhibited more complete affective recovery. My second hypothesis was that this recovery effect would be influenced by anticipation processes. There was mixed evidence for this hypothesis. In Study l, nonresilient participants showed greater orbitofrontal cortex activation (OFC), a region associated with expecting punishment, in response to the threat cue. Study 2 showed that this OFC response may be linked to nonresilient people having a greater bias toward expecting the upcoming picture to be aversive. However, in Study 3, I failed to replicate this finding, and resilient and nonresilient participants did not differ in their anticipatory affect. In the conclusion, I present a model that attempts to integrate and resolve the data from these three studies to show how resilience may interact with anticipatory and recovery processes when an expected negative event does not occur. I also discuss implications of this model for other phenomena related to resilience such as fewer depressive symptoms and greater positivity.PhDBiogeochemistryBiological SciencesEarth SciencesNeurosciencesPsychologySocial psychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/125924/2/3224783.pd