A cognitive model of psychological resilience - current thinking and future directions

When our recent paper was made open access in the Journal of Experimental Psychopathology it got me thinking about what was next for the line of research that we discussed in the paper. "A cognitive model of psychological resilience" (available here or on my Researchgate here) was my attempt to wrestle with two research domains which have potential for an integrated approach to psychological resilience and wellbeing. Separately, the cognitive-experimental approach to emotion dysfunction investigates the biased cognitive processes influencing mental ill-health, whereas, positive-psychology approaches (such as resilience approaches and positive mental health continua) inform our understanding of what it is to be healthy. While there is some cross over in these fields, for me it was not sufficient to really investigate the cognitive mechanisms of resilience, well-being and positive mental health.

As this is the general topic of my DPhil, it left a bit of a gap to fill. My initial attempt to do so involved several measures of cognitive bias and self-reports of positive mental health and resilience. This is exactly the approach that we advise against in our paper, although we do acknowledge several benefits. The main rationale is that resilience is something that is demonstrated, rather than reported. The majority of the prior research that I came across attempting to investigate the cognitive basis of psychological resilience took a similar approach, which led me to become increasingly unsatisfied with this approach.

On the flip side, the gap between these fields was further suggested to me as I read the resilience and positive mental health literature. There was a consistent lack of cognitive methods used. Or, when cognitive aspects were mentioned they typically referred to self-reported measures or the more conscious and complex biases known from social psychology, rather than the automatic selective biases that I was interested in.

I presented this paper in the form of posters and oral presentations to both audiences and ended up with very different responses from each. This first hand experience gave me more of an appreciation for the rift between the two fields and even different understandings of the terminology used. I now begin these presentations with a quick, audience specific summary, with the aim to ensure that whichever group I talk to really "gets" the purpose of our cognitive model of resilience.

Back to the present and I will be presenting a poster of our model on Thursday at the MQ Science Meeting. This seemed a perfect opportunity to do a bit more thinking about some ongoing research that gives support to the model and future research directions. The rest of this post is intended to be a more in-depth version of the poster that I will present. In part, to flesh out the material within the poster, but also to ensure that I get more of this thought process down in a much more usable form than a few scribbled notes as I create the poster. Here goes...

A cognitive model of psychological resilience

In our paper, we noted that certain biases thought to be detrimental (e.g. attention bias towards threat) have adaptive roles in certain circumstances. Therefore, the ability to flexibly switch between strategies must be important to promote adaptive responses across multiple circumstances and life events. However, flexibility is not enough, some amount of rigidity or inflexibility is also called for when the current strategy is effective or will be more effective in the long term, for example. Therefore, we hypothesised the presence of an overarching system that guides the flexible and directed application of cognitive processing strategies dependent on the present circumstances, future orientated goals, affective states, and is able to integrate with prior knowledge and experience in order to adaptively align information processing strategies. We decided to term this the mapping system and went on in the paper to detail how this system might be used to guide future research in developing more detailed cognitive accounts of psychological resilience.

Recent and ongoing research

In a novel task assessing the alignment of attentional bias (developed by Dr Lies Notebaert), it was found that participants successfully aligned their processing biases to the blocked circumstances. e.g. participants more accurately attended to controllable threats and ignored uncontrollable threats. This suggests that healthy individuals do successfully align or map cognitive bias to dynamically respond to differing circumstances, in this case the control-ability of potentially threat-related cues. Current follow-up research is investigating whether this alignment is impaired in anxious individuals.

Ongoing research in the OCEAN lab has investigated psychological flexibility in relation to resilience. Task-switching measures conceptually capture the nature of psychological flexibility as increased capacity to switch between task sets. With a more specific focus on emotional health these paradigms have been adapted to include emotional components. In one such task, participants respond to emotional and neutral faces, based on whether that face is the odd-one-out by one of several rules. Therefore, task switching can be examined when emotion is the focus of the switch, and also in cases where emotion is present, but irrelevant to the current task. In another task, working memory capacity is incorporated with emotional and non-emotional internal set-switches in order to examine this task-switching capability when it is performed internally, rather than determined by trial cues. At this stage the analyses preliminary, but potentially indicate that trait-resilience is influenced by task-switching capability in the presence of emotion.

Future research directions

Much of the following trains of thought come from an upcoming grant application which has taken up most of my thinking time for the past few months. Understandably, these are areas of research that I believe should be addressed to further our understanding of the cognitive basis of promoting psychological resilience to emotion dysfunction and the development of mental ill-health.

Developmental approaches: It is almost too common an observation that we need longitudinal and developmental approaches to mental health research. This is especially important with a cognitive approach as it is largely missing from the literature, and even less so with adolescent populations. This is unfortunate given that adolescence is a period of emotional vulnerability and that many cases of adult mental ill-health developed from adolescent emotional disorders. Thus, more research is needed taking a longitudinal approach. Of particular interest in this field would be employing large cohorts of adolescents and following them up regularly to investigate the influence of developmental changes in cognitive processing in predicting future emotional pathology and resilience to the development of such pathology.

Repetitive Negative Thinking induction procedures: worry and rumination take up valuable cognitive resources and are a contributing characteristic of many emotional disorders. Examining this maladaptive thinking style goes beyond specific diagnoses (of which there is a high rate of co-morbidity anyway). Additionally, these states can be experimentally induced which gives us the ability to directly examine the extent to which these processing styles impact processing capability and any knock-on effects on emotional information processing.

Cognitive-affective flexibility training: To examine the causal influence of a particular process on an outcome you must modify the process in question. In the cognitive-experimental approach to emotion dysfunction, this typically comes in the form of cognitive bias modification. If the modification procedure is successful in changing the process in question, then we can reasonably address the question of whether that process causally influences our desired outcome, for example tendency or susceptibility to engage in repetitive negative thinking. There has been research aimed at improving executive functioning with promising results, however, training flexibility in the context of emotion remains to be seen. Longitudinal designs can be used to examine whether these short-term transient changes or changes resulting from longer training programs go on to influence vulnerability factors and potentially boost resilience to the development of emotional disorders.

Some conclusions

A cognitive approach to psychological resilience offers many benefits and I hope that our model will serve as a catalyst for research in this area. I've briefly covered several ongoing and planned research projects with the aim to highlight how our model may be used to integrate two important fields of mental health research. In the future I will post an update on these projects and what they have taught us. Fingers crossed that we will also get funding to pursue some of the important research that is vitally needed to investigate cognitive approaches to improving adolescent psychological resilience. In the mean time, please do have a read of our paper, and I am looking forward to presenting the poster version of this post at the MQ Science meeting, which I'll also make available on my Researchgate page