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Updated: Oct 1, 2025

Author Spotlight: Unveiling Mechanisms of Stress Resilience - Significant Findings, Advancements, and Future Research
Published on: December 15, 2023
The Etiology of Resilience to Disadvantage
Alexandra Y Vazquez1, Elizabeth A Shewark1, D Angus Clark2
1Michigan State University.
Background:
Although early-life exposure to chronic disadvantage is associated with deleterious outcomes, 40-60% of exposed youth continue to thrive. To date, little is known about the etiology of these resilient outcomes.
Methods:
The current study examined child twin families living in disadvantaged contexts (N=417 pairs) to elucidate the etiology of resilience. We evaluated maternal reports of the Child Behavior Checklist to examine three domains of resilience and general resilience.
Results:
Genetic, shared, and nonshared environmental influences significantly contributed to social resilience (22%, 61%, 17%, respectively) and psychiatric resilience (40%, 28%, 32%, respectively), but academic resilience was influenced only by genetic and nonshared environmental influences (65% and 35%, respectively). These three domains loaded significantly onto a latent resilience factor, with factor loadings ranging from .60 to .34. A common pathway model revealed that the variance common to all three forms of resilience was predominantly explained by genetic and non-shared environmental influences (50% and 35%, respectively).
Conclusions:
These results support recent conceptualizations of resilience as a multifaceted construct influenced by both genetic and environmental influences, only some of which overlap across the various domains of resilience.
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