Short answers, pulled from the story.
Psychological resilience is the ability to cope mentally and emotionally with a crisis, or to return to pre-crisis status quickly. It is understood either as a developmental process that can be cultivated over time, or as a relatively stable personality trait. Most definitions center on two concepts: adversity and positive adaptation.
Emmy Werner popularized the term through a forty-year longitudinal study of children from Kauai, Hawaii, published beginning in the 1970s. She found that roughly one-third of children who grew up in adverse conditions, including homes with alcoholic or mentally ill parents, developed into well-adjusted adults. Werner attributed this to protective factors in their personalities, families, and communities.
Dopamine and endogenous opioids are the two neurotransmitters primarily responsible for stress buffering in the brain. Stress-induced changes in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus are linked to depression and anxiety, while increased activation of the medial prefrontal cortex is associated with enhanced resilience. Epigenetic modifications, including increased DNA methylation of the growth factor GDNF, also promote stress resilience.
Social support is one of the strongest predictors of resilience across contexts. Military studies found that unit cohesion and morale is the best predictor of combat resiliency, and war veterans with more social support were less likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder. The relationship between social support and stress resilience is thought to be mediated by the oxytocin system's effect on the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.
Collectivist cultures tend to pool social, natural, and economic resources after disasters, which research associated with faster recovery. However, studies found that frequency of disasters was associated with greater individualism rather than less, more strongly than either disaster magnitude or death toll. UNESCAP-funded research found communities were more physically resilient when members made resilience a collective effort rather than taking an individualistic approach.
Critics, including Brad Evans and Julian Reid in their book Resilient Life, argue that promoting resilience shifts the burden of disaster response from institutions onto individuals, drawing attention away from governmental responsibility. A study in the American Journal of Psychiatry found that children who showed resilience to adverse childhood events had higher risks for anxiety, depression, and poor health outcomes as adults, leading its authors to argue that reducing childhood trauma is preferable to promoting resilience as a response.