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Resilience Comes of Age: Defining Features in Later Adulthood
Author(s) -
Ong Anthony D.,
Bergeman C. S.,
Boker Steven M.
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
journal of personality
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.082
H-Index - 144
eISSN - 1467-6494
pISSN - 0022-3506
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-6494.2009.00600.x
Subject(s) - psychology , phenomenon , developmental psychology , orchestration , psychological resilience , life course approach , empirical research , resilience (materials science) , poverty , social psychology , musical , art , physics , philosophy , epistemology , quantum mechanics , visual arts , thermodynamics , economics , economic growth
Historically, resilience research has been largely the purview of developmental investigators dealing with early childhood and adolescence. This research primarily focused on at‐risk children who were exposed to significant and severe life adversities (e.g., extreme poverty, parental mental illness, community violence). The study of resilience in adulthood and later life, by comparison, remains largely understudied. In this article, we describe a program of research on adulthood resilience. We 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. We then summarize our own approach to the phenomenon of resilience and illustrate select parts of our 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.