The Temporal Elements of Psychological Resilience to Potential Trauma

Potential trauma is common across the life span. Responses to these highly aversive events vary significantly, yet many individuals will demonstrate psychological resilience and a clear pattern of psychological health and adaptive functioning in the wake of extreme adversity. Amid expanding conceptual diversity and a proliferation of research, we present a novel, unified framework for resilience that consists of four constituent, temporally related elements: baseline or preadversity functioning, the actual aversive circumstances, postadversity resilient outcomes, and predictors of resilient outcomes. The temporal framework integrates and extends several existing lines of research by conceptualizing resilience as a process that unfolds over time with each temporal element playing an essential role.