Annual Research Review: Positive adjustment to adversity – trajectories of minimal–impact resilience and emergent resilience

Research on resilience in the aftermath of potentially traumatic life events (PTE) is still evolving. For decades, researchers have documented resilience in children exposed to corrosive early environments, such as poverty or chronic maltreatment. Relatively more recently, the study of resilience has migrated to the investigation of isolated PTE in adults.

In this article, we first consider some of the key differences in the conceptualization of resilience following chronic adversity versus resilience following single-incident traumas, and then describe some of the misunderstandings that have developed about these constructs. To organize our discussion, we introduce the terms emergent resilience and minimal-impact resilience to represent trajectories of positive adjustment in these two domains, respectively.