Resilience Processes in Development

Dr. Masten will discuss the meaning of resilience from a developmental perspective, highlighting the significance of findings from studies of extreme adversity in childhood for our understanding of processes that nurture or disrupt human capacity for adapting to challenges over the life course. She will discuss resilience as the capacity of a system (a child, family, community, economy, or other dynamic system) to adapt to challenges that threaten system function, survival, or development. While child resilience at any given time is distributed across many interacting systems, inside and outside the organism, caregivers play a critical role both in protecting early wellbeing and nurturing the future resilience of children and their societies. She will speculate on the significance of research implicating a short list of adaptive systems strongly associated with resilience across diverse adversities and cultures.