Prospective effects of positive resilience resources during young adulthood: Predicting daily stress responses three...

With young adults' rates of mental health problems alarmingly high, understanding resilience characteristics that help young people adapt, adjust, and even thrive in the face of stress is a pressing need. This study takes a daily diary approach, examining four resilience factors, measured a priori, covering multiple domains. Young adults' daily stress responses (reactivity, recovery, inertia) during the globally stressful lockdown period three years later were then explored as key outcomes.

Leveraging two waves of data, young adults (ages 17-25, N = 108) completed demographic and psychometric measures at Wave 1. Resilience factors were operationalized using residualized scores indexing functioning relative to stress exposure. Approximately 3 years later, at Wave 2, daily diary reports of stress and psychological functioning were assessed across 14 days. Multilevel models predicted daily stress responses three years later from original resilience factors (n = 1512 observations).

Pro-social resilience demonstrated the most robust prospective associations with daily stress responses. Across resilience factors, effects were strongest for stress recovery and affective inertia than for stress reactivity, indicating that resilience was more consistently linked to how young adults recovered from stress and carried negative affect across days, and less tied to their immediate stress responses.

Findings provide early evidence of the long-arm of positive resilience resources. Distinguishing promotive attributes of resilience within a multidimensional framework, apriori, offered meaningful predictive value for characterising daily adaptive functioning several years later. Pro-social resilience emerged as particularly important for supporting adaptive functioning amid ongoing developmental demands.