Resilience: a concept for the psychological approach of human behaviour

Human resilience has been described as the capability of living in a satisfactory and socially acceptable way with positive affects in spite of present or past stress or trauma. Although it is usually described in non-clinical populations, the concept of resilience might be useful for understanding occurrence of some psychopathological states such as anxiety and affective disorders. Resilience was found in children, adolescents, adults and aged who had been coping with adversity and were leading a successful life although they could remember and describe the critical events and reminisce about them.

Many factors such as learning, memory, emotion, including functions of the brain should be taken into account for the study of resilience but this paper is limited to its psychosocial components. At a first glance in the literature they appear more important than dimensions of the personality. Example will be given of social anxiety which often handicaps victims of various stressors: assertive training, used in behaviour and cognitive therapy, was found to have a positive impact for soothing social anxiety.