Review
Quotidian resilience: Exploring mechanisms that drive resilience from a perspective of everyday stress and coping

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2011.04.008Get rights and content

Abstract

Resilience is often associated with extreme trauma or overcoming extraordinary odds. This way of thinking about resilience leaves most of the ontogenetic picture a mystery. In the following review we put forth the Everyday Stress Resilience Hypothesis where resilience is analyzed from a systems perspective and seen as a process of regulating everyday life stressors. Successful regulation accumulates into regulatory resilience which emerges during early development from successful coping with the inherent stress in typical interactions. These quotidian stressful events lead to activation of behavioral and physiologic systems. Stress that is effectively resolved in the short run and with reiteration over the long-term increases children's as well as adults’ capacity to cope with more intense stressors. Infants, however, lack the regulatory capacities to take on this task by themselves. Therefore, through communicative and regulatory processes during infant–adult interactions, we demonstrate that the roots of regulatory resilience originate in infants’ relationship with their caregiver and that maternal sensitivity can help or hinder the growth of resilience.

Highlights

► Resilience is not simply a trait inherited at birth. ► Rather, it develops from coping with everyday, typical stressors. ► Reparation of stress builds resilience while failure leads to vulnerability. ► Reparation hinges on the infant's as well as the mother's regulatory capacity. ► Thus, maternal sensitivity is a factor affecting the early development of resiliency.

Introduction

Resilience is often referred to as a trait that develops from an individual's experience with extreme adversity. For this reason, much of the research includes high-risk and traumatized individuals (e.g., Cicchetti et al., 1993, Egeland et al., 1993, Haglund et al., 2007, Luthar et al., 2000, Nomura et al., 2006). We disagree and put forth the idea that resilience can also be a regulatory, or coping capacity, that develops from infants’ experiences with everyday stress. Our perspective on the development of resilience is that all individuals, regardless of age, intermittently and frequently experience stressors in varying degrees and intensities by simply living in a world of complex social relationships and ever-changing, volatile situations. It is how the individual successfully or unsuccessfully regulates the stress that affects the development of resilience; that is how the stress is reiteratively and chronically regulated at different psychobiologic levels that molds individuals’ regulatory capacity.

Stress may not be quickly associated with infancy. What could be stressful for an infant? In home observations of healthy, typical infants and their mothers we have found that infants at 3 and 6 months of age were in distressed states 11% of the time that lasted on average about 3 min. They were in heightened, highly aroused but affectively positive states 13% of the time with an average duration of 4 min. Even when playing with their mothers in face-to-face interactions, infants expressed sad or negative affect about 3% of the time, fussy vocalizations about 3% of the time and distress indicators (e.g., spitting up) about 1% (Weinberg et al., 1999). Research findings, however, are hardly needed to demonstrate the ubiquitousness of infants’ experiencing stress. Supporting evidence is everywhere from infants crying for a bottle, fussing because they are wet or because they cannot reach an object, crying in protest when their mother leaves them alone, or for no apparent reason (i.e., the mythical gas). Infants also get highly aroused while playing a too exciting game such as peek-a-boo where over-arousal transforms laughter into tears or spitting up. These common bouts of distress, however, are limited in duration by the infants’ self-regulation of the distress (e.g., thumb sucking, attending to an interesting object) or by a caretaker's intervention (e.g., picking the infant up). Although these observations may seem boringly quotidian, they are not because it is not only coping that is at stake. Development depends on infants’ active engagement with the world of people and things.

As infants, the capacity to effectively deal with stressors is not entirely in their hands. Although infants may be able to turn away from a bright light or an intrusive face, there are obvious physical and emotional limitations that infringe on infants’ regulatory capacities. In turn infants come to depend on their main caregiver, typically the mother, to intervene when necessary. The mother's ability to attend to her infant's signals and to respond appropriately is instrumental to the development of stress regulation and of resilience.2 But perfect contingency between mother and infant is not implied for optimal growth. Rather, we propose that it is the missteps in communication with their attendant stress and their resolution – the mismatches of intentions and affect and their re-coordination – between the mother and infant that lead to resilience. Recognizing that even in typical development perfect matching (or perfect contingency) is in and of itself impossible, if it were to exist it would prohibit any occurrence of a mismatch thus leading the infant to never experience stress. However experience with stress is not sufficient to build the infant's developing capacity for resilience. Specifically, missteps in communication within the dyad may be followed by a reparatory process, a dyadic coping mechanism that focuses on the process of transforming stressful mismatching states into non-stressful states (Gianino and Tronick, 1988, Tronick, 2006, Tronick and Beeghly, 2011). On the one hand, when reparation is successful the infants’ stress level decreases and matching returns and the reiteration of successful reparation builds the infant's capacity for resilience. On the other hand, dysregulation occurs when reparation fails and dysregulation precludes infants’ engagement with the animate and inanimate world. Moreover, when engagement is chronically disrupted negative cascading processes have the potential to disrupt development in a number of different domains, including biological, relational, and behavioral realms. Thus stress regulation is critical to typical development.

Recognizing the centrality of stress regulation leads to a number of questions. In the following review we present a reconceptualization of the concept of resilience by framing its development using a systems perspective. Specifically we address the importance of the mother–infant dyad and how the environment within the dyad can prevent infants from being chronically overwhelmed by stress and can help foster the growth of their regulatory capacities.

Section snippets

The Everyday Stress Resilience Hypothesis

Our approach to questions about the emergence of a resilient, biobehavioral phenotype during the first years of life is formulated in the Everyday Stress Resilience Hypothesis. The hypothesis states that coping with everyday stressors influences infants’ regulatory capacities for these typical stressors and prepares them to cope with later, more taxing stressors. In short, everyday coping experiences develop regulatory capability and capacity or a ‘regulatory resilience’. Furthermore, based on

Stress at the macro-developmental level and the micro real-time processes that regulate it.

We frame our understanding of the development of resilience using a dynamic systems perspective. Dynamic self-organizing biological systems have a hierarchical organization operating at multiple levels and temporal scales. They are information-rich with specific, intense and continuous dynamic interactions with local contexts. Complex systems exhibit emergent properties at different levels. Self-organizing processes generate these emergent properties and lead to an increase in the complexity

Dyadic regulatory systems

Our view is that to overcome the ubiquitous stressor problem humans evolved an exceptional, though hardly unique, method for regulating this stress. Humans form a dyadic regulatory system in which the infant's regulatory capacity is supplemented, or scaffolded, by an external regulator – a caretaker, typically the mother. The dyadic regulatory process is referred to as the Mutual Regulation Model (Beebe et al., 2010, Brazelton et al., 1974, Hofer, 1994, Stern, 1976, Tronick, 1989; see also

‘Reparatory sensitivity’

Sensitivity has and is an omnipresent concept in psychology with developmental effects that are viewed as wide reaching. From Freud (1974) to Bowlby (1980), the quality of maternal sensitivity has been seen as influencing the infants’ development of relationships with others over the lifespan. Higher levels of maternal sensitivity in infancy are associated with regulation including physiological regulation (Calkins et al., 1998, Conradt and Ablow, 2010, Moore et al., 2009) and stress management

The effects of sensitivity on development

Research suggests that the quality of maternal sensitivity remains consistent across non-stressful and stressful contexts (Conradt and Ablow, 2010, Leerkes et al., 2009, McElwain and Booth-Laforce, 2006, Mills-Koonce et al., 2009, Moore et al., 2009). The stability of maternal sensitivity as broadly characterized in the literature, what we would prefer to see as ‘reparatory sensitivity’, fits well with the Everyday Stress Resilience Hypothesis with its emphasis on chronic on-going events; that

Conclusion

The concept of resilience is usually associated with coping and regulation under extreme amounts of stress. For that reason, examples of resilient behavior tend to focus more on the against-all-odds types of stories. The inner-city youth who grew up in poverty and lost both parents to violence or the physical abuse survivor, both of whom managed to become influential leaders in society. In this review, we put forth a hypothesis, the Everyday Stress Resilience Hypothesis, to present the argument

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