The role of acute stress recovery in emotional resilience

Resilience refers to the process of demonstrating better outcomes than would be expected based on the adversity one experienced. Resilience is increasingly measured using a residual approach, which typically assesses adversity and mental health outcomes over a longitudinal timeframe. It remains unknown to what extent such a residual-based measurement of resilience is sensitive to variation in acute stress resilience, a candidate resilience factor. Fifty-seven emerging adults enrolled in tertiary education completed measures of adversity and emotional experiences. To assess stress recovery, participants were exposed to a lab-based adverse event from which a Laboratory Stress Resilience Index was derived. We derived a residual-based measure of emotional resilience from regressing emotional experience scores onto adversity scores. This residual-based measure of emotional resilience predicted variance in the Laboratory Stress Resilience Index over and above that predicted by both a traditional resilience measure and the emotional experiences measure. These findings suggest that acute stress resilience may be a factor underpinning variation in emotional resilience, and that the residual-based approach to measuring resilience is sensitive to such variation in stress resilience.