Deconstructing and reconstructing resilience: a dynamic network approach

Resilience is still often viewed as a unitary personality construct that, as a kind of anti-nosological entity, protects individuals against stress-related mental problems. However, increasing evidence indicates that the maintenance of mental health in the face of adversity results from complex and dynamic processes of adaptation to stressors that involve the activation of several separable protective factors. Such resilience factors can reside at biological, psychological and social levels and may include stable predispositions (such as genotype or personality traits) and malleable properties, skills, capacities or external circumstances (such as gene expression patterns, emotion regulatio…