Dynamical Systems Principles Underlying Resistance, Resilience, and Growth.

Resilience has traditionally been conceptualized as resisting, bouncing back from, and growing from a stressor. However, recent literature has pointed out that these are different processes with bouncing back coming closest to the literal meaning of the term resilience. To detect whether an individual demonstrates one of these three stressor-responses, different analysis strategies have been suggested. However, deeper theoretical explanations for how patterns of resistance, resilience, and growth come about, have been lacking. To address this gap, this paper proposes a coherent framework based on a dynamical systems approach. We first discuss how adapting to stressors emerges from complex interactions between multiple levels of organization within the system. These interactions unfold on different time scales: What appears as resistance on slower or macro scales may actually consist of bouncing back at micro scales that change much faster. Next, we discuss how the different trajectories that distinguish resistance, resilience, and growth can be understood through attractor dynamics. We address the fixed-point attractors, which are commonly used in the resilience literature to detect early warning signals of bifurcations following resilience losses. Moreover, we describe the implications of limit cycles and strange attractors which capture multiple pathways to adapt to stressors that can lead to growth patterns. We conclude that resisting, bouncing back from, or growing from a stressor represent distinct phenomena that can be distinguished both empirically and theoretically from a dynamical systems perspective. These distinctions may drive future development of theoretical models, empirical measurements, and theory-driven interventions.