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Abstract
Resilience, the ability to overcome adversity and face stressful demands and experiences, has been strongly associated with successful aging, a low risk of diseases and high mental and physical functioning. This relationship could be based on adaptive coping behaviors, but more research is needed to gain knowledge about the strategies employed to confront social stress. Thus, we aimed to investigate the role of the use of active or passive coping strategies by resilient people in dealing with stressful situations. For this purpose, we measured resilience, coping strategies, and perceived stress in 66 healthy older adults (31 men and 35 women) between 56 and 75 years old who were exposed to stress (Trier Social Stress Test, TSST) or a control situation. The stress response was analyzed at endocrine (cortisol) and psychological (anxiety) levels. In the stress condition, moderated mediation analysis showed a conditional indirect effect of resilience on cortisol reactivity through active coping. However, passive coping strategies did not mediate the resilience-cortisol relationship. In addition, neither active nor passive coping mediated the relationship between resilience and the anxiety response. These results suggest that resilience is associated with active coping strategies, which in turn could explain, at least in part, individual differences in the cortisol response to a psychosocial laboratory stressor. These factors may prevent the development of stress-related pathologies associated with aging and facilitate healthy and satisfactory aging.
Highlights
Stress is considered one of the most significant health problems of the 21st century (World Health Organization, 2001), due to its contribution to numerous disorders, such as depression and sleep problems (Vos et al, 2016), and several age-related diseases (Zsoldos et al, 2014)
The results of this study suggest that greater resilience is associated with active coping strategies, which, in turn, are related to a lower cortisol response to stress in healthy older people
Our results highlight the importance of the relationship between resilience and active coping strategies and are in line with other studies investigating this relationship in older samples
Summary
Stress is considered one of the most significant health problems of the 21st century (World Health Organization, 2001), due to its contribution to numerous disorders, such as depression and sleep problems (Vos et al, 2016), and several age-related diseases (Zsoldos et al, 2014). The allostatic load model explains the physiological effects underlying these conditions, given that a repeated or heightened HPA axis activation could led to the activation of the fight or flight response systems (i.e., cardiovascular, muscular, among others) resulting in an allostatic load, and multiple health problems (Sterling and Eyer, 1988; McEwen, 1998). Following the cortisol reactivity threshold model (Vrshek-Schallhorn et al, 2018), the more adaptive stress response would be characterized by moderated HPA axis activation, rather than increased HPA axis reactivity (Herman et al, 2016), and stable levels of negative emotions such as anxiety (Kiecolt-Glaser et al, 2002)
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