Resilience

Resilience is a successful adaptation despite exposure to risk. It is a concept borrowed from materials science, which defines resilience as the ability of a material to absorb energy when deformed elastically and to return it when unloaded. To infer resilience in both humans and materials, therefore, two coexisting conditions must apply: (a) exposure to stress and (b) ability to withstand the impact of that stress. Resilience is not an attribute or personality trait that some possess and others do not. Rather, it is a developmental process which refers to the fact of maintaining adaptive functioning in spite of serious risk. It is also distinct from the related concept of positive adaptation because searching for resilience implies and expects that this positive adaptation occurs despite ...