Resilience to Loss and Potential Trauma

Bonanno, G. A., Westphal, M., & Mancini, A. D. (2011). Resilience to Loss and Potential Trauma. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 7(1), 511-535. doi:10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-032210-104526

Today I read this review on the train from Mainz to Amsterdam, the swinging train made me a little bit impatient, so the reading experience is not so good. 

In this classic review, Bonanno et al., (2013) pointed out that using new analytic method -- latent growth mixture modelling -- could overcome the disadvantages of two previous approach (i.e., psychopathology approach and the trauma event approach). 

figure 1, adapted from Banonno (2004)

The interesting results from the latent growth mixture modelling are that higher percentage of resilience was found. 

Then this paper reviewed factors that influence resilience: personality, exposure, SES etc. The trait self-enhancement was specially mentioned in the personality factors. Also interesting to me is that 

personality rarely explains more than 10% of the actual variance in people’s behavior across situations 

Actually, I doubt whether personality has so strong explaining power, given the factor that the typical effect size for social psychology is r = 0.21. (After checking the cited article, Mischel, 1969, I found that maybe less than 10% is more like the original meaning).

Another important information from this review is the paper actually used latent growth mixture modelling. Interestingly, many papers in the reference list were manuscripts, and the published paper can't be available, maybe because of the changed title during revision. The good thing is that at least one paper is available (this annoying fact highlight the importance of pre-print!)

Galatzer-Levy, I. R., Bonanno, G. A., & Mancini, A. D. (2010). From marianthal to latent growth mixture modeling: A return to the exploration of individual differences in response to unemployment. Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics, 3(2), 116-125. doi:10.1037/a0020077

This is what I got from a read-on-train of this paper, maybe when I re-visit this paper, I can get more information.

Then, how about the papers cited this review?

This review got 400 plus citations on google scholar. Most of these papers are about resilience in a specific domain, instead of about the general mechanism of resilience. Nevertheless, there are some interesting papers:

Beutel, M. E., Tibubos, A. N., Klein, E. M., Schmutzer, G., Reiner, I., Kocalevent, R.-D., & Brähler, E. (2017). Childhood adversities and distress - The role of resilience in a representative sample. PLoS One, 12(3), e0173826. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0173826

This study analyzed the correlation between self-reported resilience and childhood adversities and found that resilience can buffer the negative effect of early life adversity. No surprise, but science is not about surprise ;-)

Bonanno, G. A., & Diminich, E. D. (2013). Annual Research Review: Positive adjustment to adversity – trajectories of minimal–impact resilience and emergent resilience. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 54(4), 378-401. doi:10.1111/jcpp.12021

two new terms were proposed in this review: emergent resilience and minimal-impact resilience, and the conclusion is that more studies are needed?

Infurna, F. J., & Luthar, S. S. (2016). Resilience to Major Life Stressors Is Not as Common as Thought. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(2), 175-194. doi:10.1177/1745691615621271

Galatzer-Levy, I. R., & Bonanno, G. A. (2016). It’s Not So Easy to Make Resilience Go Away: Commentary on Infurna and Luthar (2016). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(2), 195-198. doi:10.1177/1745691615621277

Infurna, F. J., & Luthar, S. S. (2016). Resilience Has Been and Will Always Be, but Rates Declared Are Inevitably Suspect: Reply to Galatzer-Levy and Bonanno (2016). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(2), 199-201. doi:10.1177/1745691615621281

These three paper, Infurna & Luthar (2016)'s failure to replicate, Galatzer-Levy & Bonanno (2016)'s response, and Infurna & Luthar (2016)'s further response. The focus of these three paper is whether resilience is common as Bonanno's group previous suggested. I guess there are some parameters in the latent growth mixture modelling, so make the results relative flexible.

Infurna, F. J., & Luthar, S. S. (2017). The multidimensional nature of resilience to spousal loss. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 112(6), 926-947. doi:10.1037/pspp0000095

In this study, Infurna & Luthar (2017) used their own data to show that resilience is not common.

Malgaroli, M., Galatzer-Levy, I. R., & Bonanno, G. A. (2017). Heterogeneity in Trajectories of Depression in Response to Divorce Is Associated With Differential Risk for Mortality. Clinical Psychological Science, 5(5), 843-850. doi:10.1177/2167702617705951

Another empirical data from Bonanno's group about the resilience. 

McNally, R. J. (2012). Are We Winning the War Against Posttraumatic Stress Disorder? Science, 336(6083), 872-874. doi:10.1126/science.1222069

A brief review about PTSD, with a focus on military troops.

Southwick, S. M., Bonanno, G. A., Masten, A. S., Panter-Brick, C., & Yehuda, R. (2014). Resilience definitions, theory, and challenges: interdisciplinary perspectives. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 5(1), 25338. doi:10.3402/ejpt.v5.25338

A review of the debate of definition of resilience, I guess maybe after that scholars become more careful about the use of resilience.

Thoern, H. A., Grueschow, M., Ehlert, U., Ruff, C. C., & Kleim, B. (2016). Attentional Bias towards Positive Emotion Predicts Stress Resilience. PLoS One, 11(3), e0148368. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0148368

A cognitive study found that positive bias in attention is correlated with later resilience.