Child Abuse Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Child Abuse, including details on family violence, examinations, long-term effects, psychiatrics disorders.

Resilience and developmental psychopathology.

Kim-Cohen J

Department of Psychology, Yale University, P.O. Box 208205, New Haven, CT 06520, USA. julia.kim-cohen@yale.edu

Humans vary to a great extent in their ability to adapt to adverse experiences. Resilience reflects the positive end of this spectrum of adaptation and maladaptation in response to risk exposure. Some individuals, despite being faced with the most pernicious of adversities, manage to avoid psychologic collapse and to maintain healthy adjustment. For decades, researchers and clinicians have searched for the correlates and causes of resilience, and several comprehensive reviews of these efforts are available. This article provides an overview of resilience research and selectively summarizes recent advances in the field, with a particular focus on a developmental psychopathology perspective. This article highlights some of the challenges to resilience research and uses the example of maltreatment to illustrate some of these issues.

Published 12 March 2007 in Child Adolesc Psychiatr Clin N Am, 16(2): 271-83, vii.
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