It Is Not What Happens to You, But How You Think about It: Exploring the Cognitive Processes Underlying Resilience Following Adversity
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This chapter seeks to present a model for exploring why individuals fail to adapt to adversity. Researchers link the failure to adapt to adversity to an inability to develop higher levels of resilience following the adverse experience. This research thus performed a series of studies to develop a model of the processes that generate an inability to develop higher levels of resilience. These studies assessed individuals with high levels of negative trait emotion, which refers to the dispositional tendency for individuals to experience intense, frequent and prolonged periods of negative emotion. Researchers describe negative trait emotion as an individual’s vulnerability toward pathology following adversity and thus that person’s inability to increase levels of resilience. This chapter assesses the impact of cognitive processes on generating the inability to develop higher levels of resilience among persons high on negative trait emotion. Cognitive processes are the various thinking patterns (both automatic and deliberate) through which individuals’ attitudes, beliefs, assumptions and personal life goals influence how they anticipate, monitor, reflect on and respond to their experiences. Beck claimed that these processes predispose individuals to experiencing psychological problems in response to triggering life events and also serve to maintain the problem behaviours long after the event has passed. Cantor further asserted that each personality trait is characterised by specific cognitive processes that in turn generate and maintain the personality trait. He put forth this relationship as the main determinant of individuals’ levels of resilience. The thesis in this chapter thus uses a mediation analysis to understand the cognitive processes that characterise individuals high on negative trait emotion and the extent to which these processes explain their inability to develop higher levels of resilience.