Resilience in Development: Progress and Transformation

Abstract

This chapter reviews origins and progress in resilience science, with an emphasis on progress over the past decade in theory, findings, and translational applications for strategic intervention. In alignment with prevailing concepts in developmental systems theory, human resilience is defined as the potential or manifested capacity of an individual to adapt successfully through multiple processes to experiences that threaten his or her function, survival, or development. Resilience pathways, developmental cascades, gene‐environment interactions, and other models salient in current resilience theory are delineated, including new approaches to testing resilience‐related processes in such models. Findings on promotive and protective effects are discussed, focusing on widely replicated adaptive processes that develop in children, their families, other relationships, and key contexts as children develop. Resilience processes involving families, schools, peers, culture, and other socioecological systems are highlighted. Genetic and neurobiological processes are reviewed as a growingedge of resilience science. Intervention research based on resilience theory is discussed, together with translational implications for practice and policy based on the expanding body of knowledge about resilience processes. The chapter concludes with a review of enduring controversies, a summary of progress, and directions for the future.