Ever hear of resilience? No, it's not a secret sauce or an elixir sold by a mysterious hawker in a carnival. It's a fancy term psychologists use to describe folks who take life's lemons and make not just lemonade, but a whole dang lemon meringue pie!
Now, there's no shortage of scales to measure resilience, from the Resilience Evaluation Scale (RES) to the Brief Resilience Scale (BRS), and the Psychological Resilience Scale (PRS) - and they're multiplying faster than bunnies in springtime! They all have a knack for asking things like, "I have a number of good qualities," which might as well read, "I'm just oozing awesomeness, thank you very much!" More about these scales can be found [here].
However, in a recent project, we decided to take a slightly different tack. We weren't interested in the 'feel-good, I-can-climb-mountains' sort of resilience. We wanted the 'I've-been-through-the-mud-and-back-and-I'm-still-standing' kind of resilience. The real deal. We defined it as "a person who experiences several adverse experiences, yet does not develop psychopathology (depression, anxiety and/or somatization symptoms) over the years". Yeah, that's right, we wanted to find the superheroes living among us, minus the capes and flashy underpants.
So, how do you find such folk? Well, we administered the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) and the Brief Symptom Index 18 (BSI-18) tests. ACE examines experiences like "Did a parent or other adult in the household often swear at you, insult you, or put you down?" while BSI-18 checks for symptoms like "feeling blue". So, it's a bit like asking, "How rough was your ride?" and "Are you still enjoying the rollercoaster of life?"
Then we conducted a fancy thing called Latent Profile Analysis (LPA). It's like organizing a masquerade ball and figuring out who's who, based on their dance moves and choice of masks. There are different ways to conduct LPA, some more precise than others. We chose tidyLPA in R (see here), slightly less exact but far more nimble when you need to compare profiles across multiple potential biomarkers.
It turns out there's a surprising number of superheroes among us. Of our 300 participants, 10% had endured a high number of adverse childhood experiences and didn't show a shred of psychopathology. Another 10% experienced the same level of adversity but did develop psychopathology (the not-so-resilient ones), and the remaining 80% escaped the adversity altogether.
The icing on the cake? We found biomarkers in the top-down pain regulation (especially the serotonin and noradrenaline pathways) that hinted that our resilient folks are less sensitive to mental and physical pain. A paper's in the works, so stay tuned for the sequel!
The moral of our tale? Resilience is a lot more than feeling good about yourself. It's about enduring, overcoming, and transforming. And with tools like LPA, we're getting closer to understanding the real roots of resilience. So, even if life has given you lemons, take heart! There's a whole lot of lemon meringue pie waiting to happen.
Yours truly,
The Statistician
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