viii A potentially important adjunct to increased understanding of factors relevant to stress is
the ability to measure and assess resilience. Current knowledge provides an opportunity to expand existing instruments
to include putative biomarkers of resilience. Improved measurement techniques would benefit the study of resilience as it
is affected by stressors...
xiii Formal scientific research on the subject of resilience began in the 1970s when researcher Norman Garmezy...
turned his attention to the study of children who were 'manifestly competent' despite the stress of impoverishment...
xiv There seems little doubt that resilience can mitigate negative effects of exposure to stress.
The more pressing question now is by what mechanism(s) resilience exerts its benefit and, relatedly, how resilience can be
promoted or optimized.
xiv As yet, there is no clear consensus on the question of whether resilience is something we have (a unique
or universal capacity), something we do (coping behavior), or something we do with what we have... researchers are faced with
the logically daunting and operationally convoluted task of devising testable hypotheses to explore the relationship between
a poorly defined construct and its presumed impact, which in turn is defined by the absence of measurable change.
xviii This volume has been assembled to provide multidisciplinary perspective on the meaning and relevance
of human resilience to stress in performance-critical contexts.
p.7 the ability to perform under stress may be nothing less than critical to psychological and physical
survival.
p.8 In order to identify, measure, and screen for resilience, we need to develop a clear and useful
understanding of what makes some individuals more resilient than others to a particular type of stress, and why the
same individual might be more or less resilient to different types of stress. To that end, we can consider specific factors
that have already been linked to stress-related outcomes...
p.117-118 Although the construct of resilience is not well-defined in terms of its essential contributing
factors, it is clear that resilience promotes effective adjustment to adversity.
p.119 we argue that the manner in which people anticipate stressful events can exert a large influence on
how they recover.
p.125 In this section we have argued that the anticipation of stress is an important phenomenon
to consider in the more general context of resilience to stress and further that the effects of anticipation
are influenced by specific individual personality traits and situational variables.
p.127 resilience is more commonly viewed as an active maintenance of homeostasis and healthy function
over time... In physiology, the concept of 'allostasis' refers to the maintenance of stability through change
p.134 It is increasingly clear that in order to fully understand resilience to stress and trauma,
it is important to understand stress anticipation and recovery.
p.260 In general, cognitive resilience describes the capacity to overcome the negative effects of
setbacks and associated stress on cognitive function or performance.
p.261 There are two traditional models of psychological stress. A stimulus-based model treats stress as
a function of external influence... a response-based model holds that stress is a composite of response patterns (behavioral,
cognitive, and affective) that result from exposure to a given stressor.
More recently, a third approach has emerged to conceptualize stress more broadly as an interaction
between the individual and his or her environment... we view stress as the interaction between three transactional
elements: perceived demand, ability to cope, and perceived importance of coping with demand (McGrath, 1976).
p.271 As noted above, good JDM [Judgment and Decision Making] may depend to a large extent on the ability to
consider and use alternative heuristics.
