Predicting and promoting resilience in later life

There is something almost spellbinding about a person who flourishes despite the challenges life throws at them – what is their “secret”? The concept of “resilience” has intrigued researchers for decades, with the seminal work with children by investigators such as Emmy Werner and Michael Rutter leading the way in helping us to understand why some individuals manage to survive and thrive despite being exposed to the most challenging life circumstances (Rutter, 1979; Werner and Smith, 1989). Resilience is most commonly defined as the occurrence of positive adaptation when exposed to significant adversity (Cosco, Howse, et al., 2017; Cosco, Kok, et al., 2019; Hopper et al., 2023; Miller-Lewis et al., 2013). The definition specifies “adversity” as an inherent precondition of resilience, that is, “resilience” can only exist when there is experience of adversity. This multi-part nature of the phenomenon makes investigating resilience challenging because these adversity-adaptation dyads (of which there can be many permutations) need to be operationalized (Cosco, Kok, et al., 2019)...