Cargando…
Early-life predictors of resilience and related outcomes up to 66 years later in the 6-day sample of the 1947 Scottish mental survey
PURPOSE: Psychological resilience, the ability to manage and quickly recover from stress and trauma, is associated with a range of health and wellbeing outcomes. Resilience is known to relate to personality, self-esteem and positive affect, and may also depend upon childhood experience and stress. I...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
---|---|
Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
2016
|
Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4846692/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26880008 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00127-016-1189-4 |
Sumario: | PURPOSE: Psychological resilience, the ability to manage and quickly recover from stress and trauma, is associated with a range of health and wellbeing outcomes. Resilience is known to relate to personality, self-esteem and positive affect, and may also depend upon childhood experience and stress. In this study, we investigated the role of early-life contributors to resilience and related factors in later life. METHODS: We used data from the 6-day sample of the Scottish mental survey 1947, an initially representative sample of Scottish children born in 1936. They were assessed on a range of factors between the ages of 11 and 27 years, and resilience and other outcomes at 77 years. RESULTS: Higher adolescent dependability unexpectedly predicted lower resilience in older-age, as did childhood illnesses, while a count of specific stressors experienced throughout early life significantly predicted higher later-life resilience. We also observed significant cross-sectional correlations between resilience and measures of physical health, mental health, wellbeing and loneliness. Some of the associations between early-life predictors and later-life outcomes were significantly mediated by resilience. CONCLUSIONS: Our results support the hypothesis that stress throughout early life may help to build resilience in later-life, and demonstrate the importance of resilience as a mediator of other influences on health and wellbeing in older age. We suggest that the mechanisms determining how early-life stress leads to higher resilience are worthy of further investigation, and that psychological resilience should be a focus of research and a target for therapeutic interventions aiming to improve older-age health and wellbeing. |
---|