Resilience: What Decades of Research Actually Show

Follows: Stress vs. Burnout · How to Actually Calm Down

In this deep dive

1. The surprise: resilience is common
2. The children of Kauai
3. What actually protects people
4. Post-traumatic growth: real change, or a story we tell?
5. Can resilience be taught? The training evidence
6. Resilience is not endurance at any cost

Sensitive-topic note: this piece discusses trauma, grief and disaster. It's general information, not therapy or medical advice. If you're struggling right now, please reach out. In the US, call or text 988 (the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, free, confidential and open 24/7, and not only for suicidal crises). Elsewhere, findahelpline.com lists free helplines in more than 175 countries, or you can contact your local emergency number.

In the six months after the attacks of 11 September 2001, researchers phoned a random sample of 2,752 people in the New York area. They asked about the classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress: nightmares, flashbacks, jumpiness, numbness, avoidance. Many people had them, especially those who had been close to the towers or lost someone.

The surprise was the size of the other group. 65.1% of the sample reported no symptoms of PTSD, or just one. Even among the people most heavily exposed, the share doing that well never fell below a third.

That study, led by the Columbia psychologist George Bonanno, is one strand of a body of research that changed how psychologists think about adversity. For a long time, much of the theory about loss and trauma treated that kind of steadiness as rare, or even as a warning sign: someone who seemed fine was assumed to be in denial or not to have processed it yet. Over the past few decades, careful longitudinal studies have pushed back hard. Most people, most of the time, bend and then come back.

That's the hopeful headline. This piece also covers the fine print: how the "most people" figure depends on statistical choices, why "post-traumatic growth" is harder to measure than it sounds, what happened when the US Army tried to train a million soldiers in resilience, and why a culture that praises resilience can end up demanding that people absorb things they should never have to absorb.

Stress vs. Burnout drew a line between too much (stress) and not enough (burnout), and How to Actually Calm Down gave the body-level tools for the moment of overload. This piece zooms out from the moment to the months and years after something goes badly wrong.

Part 1 — The surprise: resilience is common

In 2004, Bonanno published a paper in American Psychologist with a provocative title: "Loss, trauma, and human resilience: Have we underestimated the human capacity to thrive after extremely aversive events?" His argument had three parts:

• Much of what psychology knew about loss and trauma came from people who sought treatment or showed great distress. That's a biased sample. People who cope well don't turn up in clinics.
• Resilience is a distinct pattern from recovery. Recovery means symptoms rise and then fade over months. Resilience means relatively stable, healthy functioning throughout, with perhaps a short, mild wobble.
• Resilience is more common than believed, and people reach it by many routes, some of them surprising.

The distinction between recovery and resilience matters. If you lose someone and fall apart for six months before slowly finding your feet, you've recovered, and that's a healthy, normal path. If you lose someone, feel real sadness, but keep sleeping, working and laughing with friends most days, you're on the resilient path, and that's normal too. Neither is a sign that something's wrong with you.

Watching people before the loss

The strongest evidence came from a study that did something unusual: it measured people before the event. A long-running survey had interviewed participants several years before some of them were widowed. Bonanno and colleagues followed 205 of those people at 6 and 18 months after their spouse died, so they could compare each person with their own baseline.

They found five patterns. The most frequent one was resilience: little disruption from the person's pre-loss level. The pattern most people think of as "normal grief," a sharp rise in distress that slowly eases, was relatively infrequent. Chronic grief was linked to dependency on the spouse before the death.

If you lose someone and keep functioning, you're not cold and you're not in denial. You're doing what the research says most people do.

Four paths, roughly in proportion

Over the next fifteen years, researchers used statistical tools called trajectory models to sort people into groups by how their symptoms changed over time. In 2018, Isaac Galatzer-Levy, Sandy Huang and Bonanno reviewed 54 such studies, covering 67 different groups of people exposed to potentially traumatic events.

The four averages add up to more than 100% because each one is averaged across a different set of studies, and not every study found all four paths.

The fine print: "most people" depends on the maths

This is where honest reporting matters, because the 65% figure has been challenged.

In 2016, Frank Infurna and Suniya Luthar re-analysed the same German survey data that earlier studies had used to argue that resilience after widowhood, divorce and unemployment is the norm. When they used the same model settings as before, resilience again came out as the most common path. But when they relaxed two technical assumptions (that every group varies by the same amount, and that people within a group all change in lockstep), the resilient group became the least common. Their title said it plainly: "Resilience to major life stressors is not as common as thought."

Their point wasn't that people are fragile. It was that any single "rate of resilience" is partly a product of modelling choices, and that policies shouldn't be built on one number. Bonanno and colleagues have argued back that the four trajectories turn up again and again across independent data sets, and the 2018 review found that the proportions held up reasonably well. Both things can be true. Healthy functioning after adversity is common, often the most common outcome. The exact percentage depends on who was studied, what counted as "doing well," and how the statistics were set up. In the 9/11 study, for example, "resilient" meant having zero or one PTSD symptom, which is a narrow test that leaves out depression, grief and quieter kinds of struggle.

Why it matters: don't force the processing

If most people are on a resilient path, interventions given to everyone after a disaster can do more harm than good. The clearest case is single-session psychological debriefing, once standard after workplace trauma, in which people were encouraged to talk through the event in detail soon afterwards. A Cochrane review of the randomised trials found that it did not reduce distress or prevent PTSD. One trial even found a higher risk of PTSD a year later among those who'd been debriefed (an odds ratio of 2.88).

The lesson isn't that talking doesn't help. It's that people differ, and a one-size-fits-all push to "process" can disrupt a recovery that was already under way. Support should be offered, not imposed. Watch for the minority who are struggling and keep struggling.

Part 2 — The children of Kauai

Long before trajectory models, one researcher had already shown that adversity is not destiny.

In 1955, every baby born on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, 698 children in all, was enrolled in a study led by the developmental psychologist Emmy Werner and her colleague Ruth Smith. They were followed from before birth through childhood, adolescence and adulthood, and in later reports into their forties. The cohort was multi-ethnic, reflecting the island's mix of families.

Werner's team recorded every kind of stress they could measure: complications around birth, poverty, family discord, parental mental illness. About a third of the children had enough of these risks stacked up early in life to be classed as high-risk.

What happened to those high-risk children is the reason the study is famous.

So the risks were real. Most of the children who faced several of them early did run into serious trouble. But a substantial minority didn't, and Werner wanted to know why.

What set them apart

Several protective factors kept appearing:

• At least one strong bond with a caring adult. It didn't have to be a parent. An aunt, a babysitter, a teacher or another mentor could fill that role.
• A place in a wider community, such as a church or a community group like the YMCA.
• Temperament and outlook. The resilient children tended to be sociable and independent, and to use whatever skills they had well. As young adults they scored far above average on internal locus of control: the belief that their own actions, not just their circumstances, shaped what happened to them.

The part that's often left out

Two later findings matter as much as the famous one-third.

First, resilience wasn't fixed. Some children who had coped well were hit by several heavy stressors at vulnerable moments, and their resilience gave way. Werner described it as a balance: protective factors on one side, stressors on the other, and for nearly everyone there's a load that tips it.

Second, many of the troubled teenagers recovered. When Werner summarised the 40-year follow-up, she reported that protective factors had enabled most of the high-risk individuals to become competent, confident and caring adults by midlife. Some people who had struggled as children picked up the skills of resilience later and went on to do as well as those who had coped from the start.

Kauai's real lesson isn't that a lucky third are born tough. It's that support at any age can change the story.

"Ordinary magic"

In 2001, the developmental psychologist Ann Masten pulled findings like Werner's together under a memorable phrase: ordinary magic. The most surprising conclusion of decades of research on children facing adversity, she wrote, was how ordinary resilience is. It doesn't come from rare, heroic qualities. It comes from the normal human systems that help everyone develop: attachment to caregivers, a brain that can learn and regulate itself, families, schools, communities.

That reframing has a sharp edge. If resilience is built from ordinary systems, then the biggest threats to children are whatever damages those systems: losing a caregiver, chronic neglect, war, schools that fail, communities pulled apart. Resilience isn't something a child either has or lacks. It's something the people and institutions around the child either support or wear down.

Limits worth knowing

The Kauai study followed one birth cohort on one island in the mid-twentieth century. Its measures were the best available then, but they were coarse by today's standards, and "competent, confident and caring" is a judgement, not a lab measurement. Still, its central findings have been echoed in many later studies, which is why Masten could call them a "short list" by the 2010s.

Part 3 — What actually protects people

If resilience is common and built from ordinary parts, what are the parts? Masten and Abigail Barnes published an updated "short list" of resilience factors from the child research in 2018, along with matching factors from research on resilient families. The parallels are striking.

Three features of this list are worth noticing.

It's mostly relationships and routines. Only a few items are qualities "inside" a person, and even those (self-regulation, problem-solving, hope) are mostly learned through relationships.

Its parts matter at different ages. Masten and Barnes point out that a sense of meaning means nothing to an infant, whose resilience depends almost entirely on the people caring for them. Teenagers and adults draw more on their own skills.

Dose matters. Protective factors work against adversity of a certain size. Pile on enough adversity and they get overwhelmed, as Werner saw on Kauai.

What predicted resilience in adults after 9/11

Bonanno's team went back to their New York data in 2007 to see which factors predicted the resilient pattern. The list was long and mostly unglamorous: gender, age, race and ethnicity, education, how directly people were exposed, whether they had lost income, social support, chronic illness, and how many other stressful events they had faced recently and in the past.

In plain language, it helps to have resources, people and room to spare. Someone who loses their job, their health and their support network in the same year has much less to draw on than someone facing one blow with savings, friends and good health intact. That's not a character judgement. It's arithmetic.

Resilience is less a trait you possess than a balance you're in: what's coming at you, against what you have to meet it with.

Flexibility beats any single strategy

What about coping style? Bonanno's more recent work argues that no single way of coping is always best. Sometimes it helps to express feelings and sometimes to hold them back. Sometimes you need to think hard about a problem, and sometimes distraction is wiser. What predicts doing well is flexibility. He breaks it into three parts:

1. Reading the situation. What is actually being asked of me right now?
2. Having a repertoire. Do I have more than one way to respond?
3. Using feedback. Is what I'm doing working? If not, can I switch?

A 2022 survey study of 563 trauma-exposed adults in the UK tested this sequence. The feedback step, noticing whether your approach is working, was linked to fewer symptoms of PTSD, anxiety and depression, and the full sequence together did better than any single part alone. It's one survey study, so treat it as support for the idea rather than proof.

This is where How to Actually Calm Down fits into the bigger picture. A slow exhale or cold water on the face is one tool in the repertoire. Knowing when to use it, when to call a friend instead, and when to change the situation itself is the flexibility.

A quick self-audit, using the research

You can't measure your resilience with a quiz, and no reputable researcher would claim you can. But the short list suggests honest questions:

• Who would I call at 2 a.m.? If no name comes to mind, that's the first thing to work on.
• What routines hold my week together? Sleep, meals, movement, a weekly ritual. These are what tend to slip first under stress, and keeping even one in place helps.
• How much spare capacity do I have? Money, time, health. Which one is thinnest?
• Do I have more than one way to cope? If your only tool is "push through," you're less flexible than you think.

Part 4 — Post-traumatic growth: real change, or a story we tell?

There's a popular idea that goes further than resilience: that suffering can make people better. People who have survived cancer, combat or bereavement often say exactly that. They appreciate life more, their relationships are deeper, and they found strength they didn't know they had.

In 1996, the psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun gave this experience a name, post-traumatic growth, and a measure: the Post-traumatic Growth Inventory (PTGI), a 21-item questionnaire covering five areas.

1. New possibilities: new paths or interests
2. Relating to others: closer relationships, more compassion
3. Personal strength: "I can handle more than I thought"
4. Spiritual change
5. Appreciation of life

The PTGI became one of the most widely used tools in trauma research, and thousands of studies have reported that people who've been through hard times score high on it. An expanded version added items on existential change in 2017, and a 10-item short form appeared in 2025.

The measurement problem

Look at how the PTGI works. It asks people, after the event, to rate how much they have changed as a result of it. That's a hard question for anyone to answer accurately. You'd need to remember what you were like before, judge how you are now, and work out how much of the difference came from the event rather than from simply getting older, other life changes or wishful thinking.

In 2009, Patricia Frazier and colleagues tested this directly. They gave a large group of university students measures of the areas growth is supposed to improve, and then measured the same things again two months later. During that window, 122 students went through a traumatic event. That meant the researchers could compare what those students said had changed, using the PTGI, with what had actually changed on the earlier measures.

The results:

• PTGI scores were mostly unrelated to actual measured change.
• Students who reported more growth had actually become more distressed. Students who showed actual growth on the measures had become less distressed.
• Reported growth was linked to a coping style called positive reinterpretation, looking for the silver lining.

Saying "I've grown from this" may be a way of coping with pain rather than a measure of having changed.

What longitudinal studies show

A 2019 meta-analysis by Judith Mangelsdorf, Michael Eid and Maike Luhmann gathered every longitudinal study they could find that measured well-being before and after major life events, not just afterwards. That came to 122 studies, with 154 samples and nearly 100,000 people. They found:

• Some real positive change in self-esteem, positive relationships and sense of mastery after events.
• That change happened after positive events too. Negative events did not produce more growth than positive ones.
• No genuine growth in meaning or spirituality, two of the areas where self-reports of growth are most common.
• In most studies that had a comparison group, people who went through the event didn't change more than people who didn't. Some of what looks like growth may be the ordinary drift of adult development.

A 2023 study by Lauren Blackie and Nathan Hudson tracked personality traits every two weeks for 16 weeks in people who'd recently experienced trauma and in a matched comparison group. The changes they found didn't fit the growth story. If anything, some traits slipped, such as agreeableness among people who didn't want to change it, and conscientiousness among people for whom the trauma had become central to how they saw themselves.

Where that leaves growth

Researchers who study this, including some of the original critics, now suggest treating post-traumatic growth as positive personality change that can be measured before and after, rather than something people report about themselves. A 2021 paper by Eranda Jayawickreme and a large group of colleagues set out how to do that.

For now, a fair summary is:

• Perceived growth is a real experience, and finding meaning in suffering can be a valuable way of coping.
• Measured growth beyond what happens anyway is much less certain, and seems to be modest where it exists.
• Growth is not required. Nobody owes their suffering a silver lining. Telling a grieving person that "everything happens for a reason," or a trauma survivor that they'll come out stronger, can add a burden: now they're failing at growth as well as hurting.

Part 5 — Can resilience be taught? The training evidence

If resilience comes from learnable skills, can a course teach them? Plenty of organisations think so. Schools, hospitals, police forces and militaries run resilience programmes. The evidence is more mixed than the brochures suggest.

The school programme behind the Army's

The Penn Resiliency Program, from the University of Pennsylvania, is a group course that teaches young people cognitive-behavioural skills for handling negative thinking and solving problems. It's one of the most studied school programmes for preventing depression.

A 2009 meta-analysis by Steven Brunwasser, Jane Gillham and Eric Kim pooled 17 controlled evaluations with 2,498 young people. Participants reported fewer depressive symptoms than those given no intervention, at the end of the programme and up to a year later. But the effects were small (between 0.11 and 0.21 on a standard scale), and the limited data showed no evidence that it beat active comparison programmes. A later pooled analysis of three trials found its effects varied a great deal from site to site.

Comprehensive Soldier Fitness

In 2008, the US Army launched Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF) under its chief of staff, General George Casey, as wars in Iraq and Afghanistan strained soldiers and their families. Positive psychology, the movement led by Martin Seligman at Penn, supplied much of the content. It had four parts: an online self-assessment called the Global Assessment Tool; self-study modules on emotional, social, family and spiritual "fitness"; formal resilience training; and Master Resilience Trainers, soldiers trained to teach thinking and coping skills to the people they led. In 2012 it was renamed Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness.

The scale was enormous. A 2013 review described it as reaching more than a million soldiers, and critics put its cost at $125 million. In January 2011, American Psychologist, the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association, devoted a special issue to it.

Then the criticism started.

The Army's own researchers produced technical reports claiming benefits, including fewer mental-health diagnoses in units with trainers. In 2014, the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine) reviewed military prevention programmes for the Department of Defense. Its summary concluded that most of these programmes were not consistently based on evidence and were evaluated "infrequently or inadequately." On CSF specifically, it said the Department of Defense had concluded the programme was effective on the basis of internal data showing only "very small effect sizes," despite outside evaluations that disputed that conclusion.

Nearly a decade later, a 2023 trial protocol from military researchers still described the field this way: few randomised studies have shown that any training programme can build resilience and prevent psychological symptoms in military personnel facing operational stress.

The lesson of CSF isn't that teaching coping skills is useless. It's that good intentions at scale are no substitute for a test.

What the broader trials show

Outside the military, the evidence is somewhat more encouraging, with important caveats.

Read the Cochrane conclusion carefully: the training may help, "but the evidence is very uncertain." Most studies had a high or unclear risk of bias, and most only measured people right after the course.

There's also a circularity problem. Many trials measure success with resilience questionnaires, which ask people whether they bounce back quickly, stay calm under pressure and so on. A course that teaches the language of resilience may change how people answer those questions without changing how they cope when the next real blow lands. The outcomes that matter most, such as fewer people developing depression or PTSD after a real event, are measured far less often.

What this means for you

Skills taught in good resilience programmes are mostly well-established techniques from cognitive behavioural therapy and mindfulness: catching catastrophic thoughts, solving problems step by step, regulating the body, asking for help. Those are worth learning. But be sceptical of any programme that promises to make people "bulletproof," and of any employer that offers a resilience workshop instead of fixing an unmanageable workload. Which brings us to the most important part.

Part 6 — Resilience is not endurance at any cost

Stress vs. Burnout ended with a warning: burnout isn't a willpower failure, it's what happens when demand outruns recovery for too long. The resilience research gives that warning a scientific backbone. There are at least four ways that "be resilient" can go wrong.

1. More adversity doesn't make you tougher

"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is half true at best. In 2010, Mark Seery, Alison Holman and Roxane Cohen Silver followed a national sample for several years and counted how many serious adverse events each person had lived through. The relationship was U-shaped:

• People with no adversity in their past did somewhat worse when new trouble hit.
• People with some adversity did best: lower distress, better functioning and higher life satisfaction.
• People with a lot of adversity did worst.

A large Danish study found the same U-shape in 2020. The likely explanation is that moderate, survivable challenges let people build coping skills and support networks, which overwhelming adversity destroys. The finding is observational, so it can't prove that adversity causes resilience, and it certainly doesn't mean anyone should seek out hardship. But it does undercut the belief that more suffering builds more strength. Past a point, it simply wears people down.

2. Resilience can be skin-deep

Some of the most sobering research in this field comes from a team led by Gene Brody and Gregory Miller studying Black youth in the rural American South, many growing up in poverty.

• In a 2013 study of 489 young people, those who showed high competence at ages 11–13 despite heavy socioeconomic risk had fewer depressive and behavioural problems at 19. But they also had higher allostatic load, a combined measure of the body's physical wear and tear.
• In a 2015 study of 292 teenagers, strong self-control predicted fewer depressive symptoms, less substance use and less aggression in low-income youth, but also faster biological ageing measured from their DNA at 22. Among better-off youth, self-control predicted good outcomes on both counts.

The researchers called this "skin-deep resilience." Pushing hard against heavy, structural odds can produce outward success while the body pays a hidden price. It echoes an older idea from the epidemiologist Sherman James called John Henryism, after the folk hero who beat a steam drill and died from the effort: sustained, high-effort coping with chronic disadvantage. A 2026 analysis of more than 1,700 Black adults in the Jackson Heart Study found that among people high in John Henryism, each step up in income disadvantage was linked to roughly double the risk of heart failure.

These are observational studies of specific populations, so they don't show that effort itself is harmful. They show that when the odds are structural, individual grit has a cost, and that praising people for enduring can hide that cost.

Bouncing back is healthy. Absorbing endlessly is not resilience; it's a slow injury that looks like strength.

3. Knowing when to quit is part of resilience

The cultural script says resilient people never give up. The research says something more subtle. In 2003, Carsten Wrosch, Michael Scheier and colleagues studied people's ability to disengage from unattainable goals and then reengage with new ones. In three studies, including one of parents of children with cancer, both abilities were linked to higher well-being. And the two abilities interacted: letting go seems to work best alongside finding something new to aim for.

Sometimes the resilient move is to stop. You might leave the job that is burning you out, end the relationship that drains you, or give up the goal that has become impossible. Persistence is a virtue when the goal is reachable and worth it. When it isn't, persistence is just a slower way to lose.

4. Recovery is part of the job, not a reward for finishing it

The research on recovery from work supports what Stress vs. Burnout said about rest. A 2016 meta-analysis covering more than 38,000 employees found that psychological detachment, actually switching off from work in your free time, was associated with less exhaustion, better sleep, higher life satisfaction and even better task performance. The people who find it hardest to detach are those with heavy demands and those heavily invested in their work, which is exactly who needs it most. A 2021 meta-analysis of interventions found that detachment can be improved, with a modest average effect (0.36), and that longer, higher-dose programmes worked better.

So the resilient life isn't one with no breaks. It's one with regular, protected recovery, so the system never runs as dry as burnout.

Resilience belongs to systems, not just people

Masten defines resilience as the capacity of a system to adapt to challenges that threaten its function, and she means that definition to scale up from a person to a family, a school, a hospital or a whole economy. That changes the question. If nurses are burning out, "how do we make nurses more resilient?" is only half of it. The other half is whether the staffing, scheduling and leadership of the hospital are resilient.

Individual skills matter. The flexibility, the routines and the relationships in Part 3 are real, and you can build them. But when someone tells you to be more resilient, it's fair to ask what they're doing to reduce the load.

The takeaway

Decades of research show that resilience after loss and trauma is common, usually the most common outcome, though the exact percentage depends on how it's measured. It's built from ordinary things: close relationships, routines, resources, a sense of agency, and the flexibility to change tactics when one isn't working. It isn't fixed. Enough adversity can overwhelm anyone, and support at any age can help people recover. Post-traumatic growth is a real feeling but hard to verify as real change, and nobody owes their suffering a silver lining. Resilience training helps a little, with uncertain evidence; the Army's huge programme is a warning about scaling up before testing. Most importantly, resilience is not endurance at any cost: some adversity may build capacity, but heavy, structural adversity wears people down even when they look fine, and knowing when to rest or quit is part of being resilient.

Try this: take ten minutes and fill in a "resilience map" on paper with four lines. People: two names you could call in a crisis. If you can't find two, plan one coffee this month. Routines: the one daily habit that keeps you steady, and how you'll protect it next time things get hard. Load: one ongoing stressor you could reduce, delegate or drop. Goals: one goal you're holding onto that may need letting go, and what you'd aim for instead.

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- Bonanno, G.A. (2004). Loss, trauma, and human resilience: Have we underestimated the human capacity to thrive after extremely aversive events? American Psychologist, 59(1), 20–28.
- Bonanno, G.A., Galea, S., Bucciarelli, A. & Vlahov, D. (2006). Psychological resilience after disaster: New York City in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attack. Psychological Science, 17(3). And (2007), What predicts psychological resilience after disaster? Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 75(5).
- Bonanno, G.A. et al. (2002). Resilience to loss and chronic grief: A prospective study from preloss to 18-months postloss. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(5).
- Galatzer-Levy, I.R., Huang, S.H. & Bonanno, G.A. (2018). Trajectories of resilience and dysfunction following potential trauma: A review and statistical evaluation. Clinical Psychology Review, 63.
- Infurna, F.J. & Luthar, S.S. (2016). Resilience to major life stressors is not as common as thought. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(2).
- Rose, S., Bisson, J., Churchill, R. & Wessely, S. (2002). Psychological debriefing for preventing post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.
- Werner, E.E. (1989). High-risk children in young adulthood: A longitudinal study from birth to 32 years. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 59(1). Werner, E.E. (1997). Vulnerable but invincible: High-risk children from birth to adulthood. Acta Paediatrica, Supplement. Werner, E.E. (2004). Journeys from childhood to midlife. Pediatrics, 114(2). Kauai figures and quotations as reported in Maria Konnikova, "How People Learn to Become Resilient," The New Yorker, 11 February 2016; protective factors also per APA Monitor on Psychology (2017) as summarised in Werner's Wikipedia entry.
- Masten, A.S. (2001). Ordinary magic: Resilience processes in development. American Psychologist, 56(3). Masten, A.S. & Barnes, A.J. (2018). Resilience in children: Developmental perspectives. Children, 5(7), 98 (the shortlist table).
- Robinson, M. et al. (2022). A path to post-trauma resilience: a mediation model of the flexibility sequence. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 13(2).
- Tedeschi, R.G. & Calhoun, L.G. (1996). The Posttraumatic Growth Inventory. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 9(3). Tedeschi, R.G. et al. (2025). A short form of the expanded PTGI (PTGI-X-SF). Psychological Trauma.
- Frazier, P. et al. (2009). Does self-reported posttraumatic growth reflect genuine positive change? Psychological Science, 20(7).
- Mangelsdorf, J., Eid, M. & Luhmann, M. (2019). Does growth require suffering? A systematic review and meta-analysis on genuine posttraumatic and postecstatic growth. Psychological Bulletin, 145(3).
- Blackie, L.E.R. & Hudson, N.W. (2023). Trauma exposure and short-term volitional personality trait change. Journal of Personality. Jayawickreme, E. et al. (2021). Post-traumatic growth as positive personality change. Journal of Personality, 89(1).
- Brunwasser, S.M., Gillham, J.E. & Kim, E.S. (2009). A meta-analytic review of the Penn Resiliency Program's effect on depressive symptoms. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 77(6). Brunwasser, S.M. & Gillham, J.E. (2018). Prevention Science.
- Comprehensive Soldier Fitness: Casey (2011), Cornum, Matthews & Seligman (2011) and Lester et al. (2011) in the January 2011 American Psychologist special issue; Eidelson, Pilisuk & Soldz (2011) and Quick (2011), American Psychologist, 66(7); Smith (2013), Journal of Behavioral Health Services & Research; Steenkamp, Nash & Litz (2013), American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 44(5); launch year and renaming per the programme's Wikipedia entry; Peterson, A.L. et al. (2023), Frontiers in Psychiatry (trial protocol).
- Institute of Medicine (2014). Preventing Psychological Disorders in Service Members and Their Families: An Assessment of Programs. National Academies Press, Summary.
- Joyce, S. et al. (2018). Road to resilience: a systematic review and meta-analysis of resilience training programmes and interventions. BMJ Open, 8(6). Kunzler, A.M. et al. (2020). Psychological interventions to foster resilience in healthcare professionals. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.
- Seery, M.D., Holman, E.A. & Silver, R.C. (2010). Whatever does not kill us: Cumulative lifetime adversity, vulnerability, and resilience. JPSP, 99(6). Carstensen, T.B.W. et al. (2020). Adverse life events in the general population: a validation of the cumulative lifetime adversity measure. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 11(1).
- Brody, G.H. et al. (2013). Is resilience only skin deep? Psychological Science, 24(7). Miller, G.E., Yu, T., Chen, E. & Brody, G.H. (2015). Self-control forecasts better psychosocial outcomes but faster epigenetic aging in low-SES youth. PNAS, 112(33). Glover, L.M. et al. (2026). Socioeconomic disadvantage, John Henryism, and incident heart failure in the Jackson Heart Study. Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes.
- Wrosch, C. et al. (2003). Adaptive self-regulation of unattainable goals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29(12).
- Wendsche, J. & Lohmann-Haislah, A. (2016). A meta-analysis on antecedents and outcomes of detachment from work. Frontiers in Psychology, 7. Karabinski, T. et al. (2021). Interventions for improving psychological detachment from work: A meta-analysis. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 26(3).
- 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (988lifeline.org); Find A Helpline (findahelpline.com, run by ThroughLine).

Go deeper
- 📘 The End of Trauma — George A. Bonanno (2021). The researcher behind the trajectories explains what they mean, including his "flexibility" model and where he thinks PTSD research went wrong. The best single book on Parts 1 and 3.
- 📘 Ordinary Magic: Resilience in Development — Ann S. Masten (2014). The developmental view, from Kauai to war zones; more academic, but clear and humane.
- 🌐 Masten & Barnes (2018), "Resilience in Children: Developmental Perspectives" — free full text. A short, readable review with the full shortlist and the "systems" definition of resilience.
- 🌐 Maria Konnikova, "How People Learn to Become Resilient," The New Yorker. A well-told magazine account of Werner's Kauai study and Bonanno's work.
- 🌐 Institute of Medicine (2014), Preventing Psychological Disorders in Service Members, Summary. Read the official, measured verdict on military resilience programmes for yourself.
- 🌐 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (US) · Find A Helpline (worldwide). Free, confidential support by phone, text or chat.
- 🌐 See also, in this library: Stress vs. Burnout, How to Actually Calm Down, and next in this series, Character: What Strengths, Virtues and Grit Research Gets Right and Wrong.

Sensitive-topic note: if a loss or trauma is still disrupting your sleep, work or relationships after several weeks, or if you're having thoughts of harming yourself, that's a reason to talk to a doctor or a mental-health professional now, not a sign you've failed at resilience. Effective treatments for PTSD, depression and complicated grief exist.