The Etiology of Resilience to Disadvantage.

Abstract

Although early-life exposure to chronic disadvantage is associated with deleterious outcomes, 40-60% of exposed youth continue to thrive. To date, little is known about the etiology of these resilient outcomes. The current study examined child twin families living in disadvantaged contexts (N=417 pairs) to elucidate the etiology of resilience. We evaluated maternal reports of the Child Behavior Checklist to examine three domains of resilience and general resilience. Genetic, shared, and nonshared environmental influences significantly contributed to social resilience (22%, 61%, 17%, respectively) and psychiatric resilience (40%, 28%, 32%, respectively), but academic resilience was influenced only by genetic and nonshared environmental influences (65% and 35%, respectively). These three domains loaded significantly onto a latent resilience factor, with factor loadings ranging from .60 to .34. A common pathway model revealed that the variance common to all three forms of resilience was predominantly explained by genetic and non-shared environmental influences (50% and 35%, respectively). These results support recent conceptualizations of resilience as a multifaceted construct influenced by both genetic and environmental influences, only some of which overlap across the various domains of resilience.