Stress, Risk, and Resilience in Children and Adolescents (Haggerty, Sherrod, Garmezy, Rutter, 1996)

Stress, Risk, and Resilience in Children and Adolescents (Haggerty, Sherrod, Garmezy, Rutter, 1996)

Processes, Mechanisms, and Interventions

Review
"...this is a unique work that provides a comprehensive overview of the research accomplished to date on stress, coping, and resilience in children and adolescents....it provides a foundation for pediatric psychologists as they attempt to understand the unique stressors associated with illness, disease, and other adversities that children are compelled to endure. The book is required reading for any pediatric psychologist or scholar who is interested in a program of research on stress, coping, and resilience." Ronald Brown and Joan E. Donegan, Journal of Pediatrics

Product Description
Many children's behavioral problems have multiple causes, and most children with one problem behavior also have others. The co-occurrence and interrelatedness of risk factors and problem behavior is certainly an important area of research. This volume recognizes the complexity of the developmental processes that influence coping and resilience and the roles sociocultural factors play. The contributors focus on four themes that have emerged in the study of risk and coping over the past decade: interrelatedness of risk and problems, individual variability in resilience and susceptibility to stress, processes and mechanisms linking multiple stressors to multiple outcomes, and interventions and prevention. Psychologists, pediatricians, and others involved in the research or care of children will take great interest in this text.

JLJ - We look to this text for equivalent ideas in game theory. How can we put effective stress on our opponent in a game (to force events in our favor), and how can we mitigate the effects of similar stress placed by our opponent on us?

p.7 The danger to children lies in the cumulation of adversities that exist in many families but are evident disproportionately in the poor (Garmezy & Masten, 1994).

p.9 For they point to the far-reaching range of risk research, which embraces a broad band of risk factors to which children and adults can be exposed - some may eventuate in disease or disorder (which identifies vulnerability), but others, in many instances, may be overcome and lead to positive adaptive behavior (which identifies resilience).

p. 11 An awareness of the power of chronic and cumulative adversities (Garmezy & Masten, 1994) has now become evident in at-risk studies.

p.12 If a child or an adult is subjected to stressor upon stressor, negative consequences will follow (Garmezy & Masten, 1994).

p.16 Garmezy, N., & Masten, A. (1994 pp. 191-208). Chronic adversities. In M. Rutter, L. Hersov, & E. Taylor (Eds.), Child and adolescent psychiatry (3rd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications.

p.21 Research on risk and resilience has been guided in recent years by a concern with stress-moderating processes, a dynamic through which harmful effects of stress are offset by various coping resources. Although this remains a powerful investigatory model, alternative views of process have recently been advanced, notably the idea of stress mediation whereby stressors may also function to erode environmental and personal coping resources.

p.25 In sum, the three traditional approaches to stress research - the social structural or family background, cumulative stressful events, and singular stressors - share a set of limitations involving conceptualization of risk... Assessments of risk... must be sufficiently exhaustive to make meaningful the idea of resilience

p.26 This approach, as Weaton (1990) has noted, differs from the tradition of coping and stress-buffering studies described later in this chapter, which focus on individual responses to stress, with the impact of stressors being influenced by the mobilization of personal and social resources.

p.33 This problem has suggested... considerations in the stressor-support nexus, namely the extent to which stressors bring about disorder precisely because they alter the availability and efficacy of coping-related resources.

p.56 On the positive side, to understand resilience we must ask not only about the nature of the individual's responses to stress; in addition, a developmental perspective directs attention to whether and how protective factors can develop under adversity.

p.101 Resilience refers to the process of, capacity for, or outcome of successful adaptation despite challenging or threatening circumstances. Psychological resilience is concerned with behavioral adaptation, usually defined in terms of internal states of well-being or effective functioning in the environment or both. (Masten, Best, & Garmezy, 1990. p. 426)

p.112 Along with the experience of the [single, stressful event] itself, the associated accumulation of events contributes to the emergence of psychological resilience or vulnerability.

p.356 As Clark at al. put it, it is the aggregated accumulation of events over time that contributes to the emergence of psychological resilience or vulnerability in individual cases (see also Garmezy & Masten, 1994).