CCSS Meeting #68: What is (not) Resilience? – Using Insights from Complex Systems to Gain Conceptual Clarity

This lecture will be held in physical format at the CCSS Living Room (Min. 4.16) with lunch and refreshments provided. The theme of this CCSS Lunch Meeting is Resilience.

Speaker Overview

Dr. Yannick Hill obtained his PhD at the Department of Developmental Psychology, University of Groningen and worked as a postdoc at the Institute for Sport and Sport Science at Heidelberg University. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor Sports and Performance Psychology at the Faculty of Behavioral and Movement Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU Amsterdam) and the programme manager of the Amsterdam Institute of Sport Science (AISS). Yannick is also an International Research Affiliate at the Lyda Hill Institute for Human Resilience, University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS). His main research interest focuses on how individuals adapt to stressors in order to demonstrate resilience or even growth. Specifically, Yannick is interested in how to capture the dynamics of resilience as a process and determining the optimal loading for individuals to stimulate peak performance in any kind of achievement context, such as education, occupation, or sports. Thereby, he applies a dynamical systems approach and propose that detecting nonlinear variations in timeseries data can indicate whether positive and negative transitions are about to occur.

Lecture Overview

The term resilience has become somewhat of a buzzword in psychological research. Despite – or perhaps because of – the increased attention on resilience its definition and operationalization has become ambiguous. Clarifying the concept of resilience is crucial for developing effective interventions and promoting mental health. Currently, there seems to be consensus that resilience is a dynamic process, the specific characteristics of the process are rarely discussed. Specifically, some researchers argue for resisting the perturbation caused by a stressor, bouncing back following a perturbation, growing from a perturbation, or a combination of these three processes. However, in a series of articles, my colleagues and I have strived to disentangle these three conceptualizations using complex systems arguing that the bouncing back comes closest to the original meaning of the term. That is, we need to first discuss what we actually mean by “dynamics” (Hill et al., in press). Next, we argue that we can use timeseries to distinguish resistance, resilience, and growth (Den Hartigh & Hill, 2022). Finally, we provide some theoretical underpinnings regarding how and why these processes are distinct (Hill & Den Hartigh, 2024) as well as a discussion on whether resilience is always desirable (Hill et al., 2024). In this presentation, I will address these three key steps that we hope will provide the necessary clarity for resilience research in the future as well as its potential applications.

Key publications:

• Den Hartigh, R. J. R. & Hill, Y. (2022). Conceptualizing and Measuring Psychological Resilience: What Can We Learn from Physics?. New Ideas in Psychology, 66, 100934. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2022.100934
• Hill, Y., & Den Hartigh, R. J. R. (2024). Understanding the dynamics of resistance, resilience, and growth on different scales of analysis. Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences. 28, 325-343.
• Hill, Y., Dolezal, M. L., Nordbeck, P. C., Den Hartigh, R. J. R., Pincus, D., Kiefer, A. W., & Ricca, B. P. (in press). Moving from traits to the dynamic process: The next steps in research on human resilience. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment, & Trauma.
• Hill, Y., Morison, M., Westphal, A., Gerwann, S., & Ricca, B. P. (2024). When Resilience Becomes Undesirable – A Cautionary Note. New Ideas in Psychology, 73, 101076. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2024.101076

There will be 30-min lecture from the speaker, followed by a 30-min discussion session.

To attend the lecture, please signup below before 15:00 on Wednesday October 16.