It’s Not So Easy to Make Resilience Go Away

Abstract

A large number of studies have identified trajectories of adjustment following acute and aversive life events. In these studies, a stable trajectory of positive health or resilience is almost always the modal outcome (Bonanno, 2004; Bonanno et al., 2011). Infurna and Luthar (2016, this issue) reported that they replicated findings from two early studies in which trajectories of subjective well-being were identified before and after divorce, widowhood, and unemployment (Galatzer-Levy, Bonanno, & Mancini, 2010; Mancini, Bonanno, & Clark, 2011) and then reanalyzed these data in such a way to conclude a decrease in the prevalence of resilience. In this commentary, we discuss three serious flaws in Infurna and Luthar’s claims. First, they did not actually replicate our original analyses. They used different data, time points, and parameters. Second, the model specifications in their reanalyses were not optimal because they increased variance, reduced variability in response to the stressor, and had lower entropy, indicating that their models more poorly captured unique patterns of response. Third, their reanalyses were theoretically uninformative as they minimized both group differences and overall responses to the stressor event and thus failed to identify widely acknowledged populations, such as chronic stress reactivity.