Fighting Fire With Resilience

Abstract

The personality trait resilience (R) has been shown to buffer the relationship between stress and disease. As such, R has been studied in military and other high stress occupations as important to both mental health (MH) and physical health (PH). Specifically in military populations, R predicted PH but this effect was mediated by MH. PURPOSE: Assess the extent to which R predicts PH and MH in a sample of recruit firefighters and systematically assess the interrelationships of R, MH, and PH. METHODS: Male recruit firefighters (N=51; M age = 25.80 ± 4.51 yrs) underwent 7 weeks of training at a state-mandated fire training institute. All participants completed the Dispositional Resilience Scale-15 during week 1 and the Short Form 36 Medical Outcomes Survey during weeks 1 and 7. Regression analyses were used to examine the relationships between R, PH, and MH. RESULTS: Hierarchical regression indicated that R explained 7.9% [Fchange(1,48) = 4.19, β = 0.282, P= 0.046] and 9.3% [Fchange(1,48) = 5.0, β = 0.306, P= 0.03] unique variance in PH during week 1 and week 7, respectively; after accounting for age. Additionally, R explained 11.9% [Fchange(1,47) = 6.48, β = 0.393, P= 0.014] and 9.2% [Fchange(1,47) = 4.83, β = 0.316, P= 0.033] unique variance in PH after accounting for both age and MH in weeks 1 and 7, respectively. After accounting for age, hierarchical regression indicated that R explained 21.4% [Fchange(1,48) = 13.74, β = 0.464, P=0.01] and 7.7% [Fchange(1,48) = 4.04, β = 0.279, P=0.05] unique variance in MH during weeks 1 and 7, respectively. However, MH did not significantly predict, nor was MH significantly related to PH during weeks 1 or 7. CONCLUSIONS: These findings replicate the notion that R is positively associated with MH and PH, and extends this effect to recruit firefighters. Unlike previous work with military populations, R predicted PH without mediation by MH. Further investigation into these variables seems warranted. Better understanding such variables could be useful in the recruitment of future firefighters or to other high stress occupations.