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On June 23, 2006, Jack O’Connell, State Superintendent of Public Instruction in California, Bonnie Benard, Senior Program Associate, WestEd, and Greg Austin, Program Director of WestEd’s Health and Human Development Program video taped a presentation on the relationship between academic success and youth development. Benard examined the various aspects of a "supportive school environment" and its relationship to students’ academic success. Austin provided an overview of the California Healthy Kids Survey (CHKS) Student and Staff School Climate surveys and the relationship of CHKS resilience indicators to Academic Performance Index (API) and Scholastic Aptitude Test-9 (SAT-9) scores and other measures of academic performance and school behavior. The presentation provides detailed information that will assist school and district staff as they implement youth development strategies.
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In recent years, a growing body of evidence has linked positive emotional health with lower cardiovascular morbidity and mortality, independent of negative emotion. Several potential mechanisms have been posited to account for these associations, including improved health behavior, direct physiological benefits, and enhanced resistance to and recovery from stress among individuals with high versus low positive emotional resources. Links between positive emotion and health have implications for targeted interventions, but no empirical investigations to date have tested the impact of efforts to enhance positive emotion on cardiovascular risk. Nevertheless, some existing data explored in this article point to the potential value of strategies to increase emotional resources for individuals’ functional health and capacity to manage stress.
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This study aims to promote awareness of the effects of trauma and loss and identify useful approaches to enhance the emotional well-being of shelter staff and residents.
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Peri- and posttraumatic emotional responses have been understudied, and furthermore, have rarely been compared among trauma types. The current study compared college students’ retrospective self-reports of peri- and posttraumatic responses of fear, shame, guilt, anger, and sadness among four types of traumatic events: sexual assault, physical assault, transportation accident, and illness/injury. Overall emotional responding was generally high for all trauma types, and for those in the sexual assault group, emotion increased sharply from the peri- to posttraumatic time-point. Generally, fear was higher during the trauma compared to after the trauma, whereas the other emotions tended to remain stable or increase posttrauma. The sexual assault group tended to report higher levels of posttrauma emotion than the other trauma type groups.
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Little is known about the possible effects of social resources on stroke survivors’ level and change in cognitive outcomes. Understanding this association may help identify strategies to improve stroke recovery and help elucidate the etiology of dementia. This study examined the relationship of social ties and social support to cognitive function and cognitive change 6 months after stroke. The results suggest that emotional support may promote cognitive resilience while social ties provide cognitive reserve that protects against impaired cognition after stroke. Social ties did not predict cognitive recovery however, so reverse causation cannot be ruled out.
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Depression and poor social support are significant risk factors for coronary heart disease (CHD), and stress and anxiety can trigger coronary events. People experiencing such psychosocial difficulties are more likely to be physically inactive, which is also an independent risk factor for CHD. Resilience training can target these risk factors, but there is little research evaluating the effectiveness of such programs. This paper describes the design and measures of a study to evaluate a resilience training program (READY) to promote psychosocial well-being for heart health, and the added value of integrating physical activity promotion.
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Posttraumatic growth (PTG) research is an emerging area of empirical study, especially within the field of clinical health psychology. Much of the research in this area has thus far focused on determining the correlates and predictors of PTG. This systematic review aimed to evaluate the association between posttraumatic growth and dispositional optimism, specifically in relation to health traumas. Results regarding the relationship between dispositional optimism and posttraumatic growth were found to be equivocal. A number of conceptual and methodological issues were identified and discussed in relation to the field of PTG research. Future directions for research are provided.
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In this article, the authors describe a program of research on adulthood resilience. They begin with a selective review of the broad literature on resilience, giving emphasis to the major approaches, empirical findings, and guiding principles that characterize prior studies. They then summarize their own approach to the phenomenon of resilience and illustrate select parts of their previous and ongoing studies of older adults. Findings from this research add to the growing body of empirical evidence suggesting that resilience is a common phenomenon that emerges from the coordinated orchestration of basic human adaptive processes.
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This article focuses on the contributions that the program of research on the New Beginnings Program (NBP) has made to understanding pathways to resilience in youth who experience parental divorce. The research demonstrating that divorce increases risk for mental health, physical health, and social adaptation problems is notably reviewed. The theory and research linking social environmental-level and youth-level modifiable risk factors and resilience resources to youth’s postdivorce adjustment are also presented. The short-term and long-term results of two experimental, randomized efficacy trials of the NBP and moderators and mediators of its effects are then showed.
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This article examines resilience at older ages, focusing on the relationships between quality of life and adversity. The objectives are to identify (a) the basis of adversity, (b) the characteristics of resilient individuals, and (c) the attributes that attenuate the full impact of adversity. Overall results indicate that policies that offer access to protection and help minimize adversity exposure where possible will promote resilience.
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This study’s aim was to determine whether resilience scales could predict adjustment over and above that predicted by the five-factor model (FFM). The results showed that the FFM scales accounted for the highest proportion of variance in disturbance. For adaptation, the resilience scales contributed as much as the FFM. In no case did the resilience scales outperform the FFM by increasing the explained variance. The results challenge the validity of the resilience concept as an indicator of human adaptation and avoidance of disturbance, although the concept may have heuristic value in combining favorable aspects of a person’s personality endowment.
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Trajectories of daily parenting stress were studied for both mothers and fathers of children with intellectual disabilities (ID) across child ages 36–60 months, as were specific familial risk and resilience factors that affect these trajectories, including psychological well-being of each parent, marital adjustment and positive parent–child relationships. The authors observed that parenting stress processes are not shared entirely across the preschool period in parents of children with ID. Although individual parent characteristics and high-quality dyadic relationships contribute to emerging resilience in parents of children with ID, parents also affect each others’ more resilient adaptations in ways that have not been previously considered.
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This study explores hope and its relationships with parental well-being in parents of school-aged children with intellectual disability (ID). Results showed that for mothers, regression analyses revealed that lower levels of hope (agency and pathways) and more child behaviour problems predicted maternal depression. Positive affect was predicted by less problematic child behaviour and by higher levels of hope agency. For fathers, anxiety and depression were predicted by low hope agency and positive affect was predicted by high hope agency. Hope pathways was not a significant predictor of paternal well-being. Hope agency and pathways interacted in the prediction of maternal depression such that mothers reporting high levels of both hope dimensions reported the lowest levels of depressive symptoms.