Understanding Resilience: From Negative Life Events to Everyday Stressors

Resilience is typically conceptualized as successful adaptation to serious negative life events. Even relatively mundane stressors, however, require coping. Therefore, we argue that resilience should reflect managing well with stressors in general. To support the argument that resilience is relevant for social psychology and that social psychology can inform our understanding of resilience, we first discuss a program of research that links prior life adversity exposure to resilience to everyday stressors. We next review a psychophysiological approach—the biopsychosocial model of challenge/threat—to assessing resilience as it occurs and tie this approach to research on coping resources. Finally, we highlight two central research areas within social psychology—romantic relationships and stigma and prejudice—for which resilience is highly relevant. This demonstrates the merits of applying the concept of resilience to a range of stressors and the potential for experimental social psychology to inform understudied aspects of resilience.