FIGURE 1.

Outcome-based resilience, resilience factors, and resilience processes. A: the red box depicts a life episode of substantial stressor exposure, such as a chronic somatic disease, harsh social circumstances, a difficult life transition, or other enduring challenges. Stressful life phases often also follow on a potentially traumatic event (PTE) or other major negative life event. Mental health reactions (blue lines) to comparable stressor exposure can vary greatly between individuals. In an outcome-based framework, individuals with eventual levels of mental health problems (e.g., dysfunctions related to posttraumatic stress, fear, anxiety, or depression symptomatology) that are close to prestressor levels can be classified as more resilient than individuals with lastingly heightened problem levels (right). Because, unlike in this hypothetical example, stressor exposure in real life also varies greatly, detailed assessment of individual stressor exposure is as central to determining resilience as assessment of mental health reactions. Otherwise, individuals showing less severe reactions than others only because they are also less exposed may be erroneously classified as resilient (30). B: provided appropriate normalization to stressor exposure, one can try to predict good mental health outcomes (fewer mental health problems) from baseline measurements of preexisting resilience factors (RFs), which can be social, psychological, or biological individual-differences variables, stable or modifiable. C: a hypothetical example of a comparatively resilient individual who struggles for some time after onset of the stressful life episode to then recover nearly to prestressor levels of mental health problems. Over the course of the coping process, the individual develops higher strength of a modifiable RF (e.g., a better emotion regulation skill), which helps the recovery. Identification of prototypical causal resilience processes (RPs) is a central goal of resilience research. D: going through a time of stressor exposure or repeated exposures (first box) in relatively good mental health through an RP (through strengthening of an RF) can make it more likely that one will also go through future adversity (second box) in relatively good mental health (stress inoculation), provided the strengthened RF is suitable to address the future challenge.