Norman Garmezy

Resilience and development: Contributions from the study of children who overcome adversity

This article reviews the research on resilience in order to delineate its significance and potential for understanding normal development. Resilience refers to the process of, capacity for, or outcome of successful adaptation despite challenging or threatening circumstances. Three resilience phenomena are reviewed: (a) good outcomes in high-risk children, (b) sustained competence in children under stress, and (c) recovery from trauma. It is concluded that human psychological development is highly buffered and that long-lasting consequences of adversity usually are associated with either organic damage or severe interference in the normative protective processes embedded in the caregiving system. Children who experience chronic adversity fare better or recover more successfully when they have a positive relationship with a competent adult, they are good learners and problem-solvers, they are engaging to other people, and they have areas of competence and perceived efficacy valued by self or society. Future studies of resilience will need to focus on processes that facilitate adaptation. Such studies have the potential to illuminate the range and self-righting properties of, constraints on, and linkages among different aspects of cognitive, emotional, and social development.

The study of stress and competence in children: a building block for developmental psychopathology

This article discusses the building blocks for a developmental psychopathology, focusing on studies of risk, competence, and protective factors. The current Project Competence studies of stress and competence are described, with particular attention to the methodology and strategies for data analysis. The authors present a 3-model approach to stress resistance in a multivariate regression framework: the compensatory, challenge, and protective factor models. These models are illustrated by selected data. In the concluding section, an evaluation of the project is offered in terms of future directions for research.

Competence in the context of adversity: Pathways to resilience and maladaptation from childhood to late adolescence

Competent outcomes in late adolescence were examined in relation to adversity over time, antecedent competence and psychosocial resources, in order to investigate the phenomenon of resilience. An urban community sample of 205 (114 females, 90 males; 27% minority) children were recruited in elementary school and followed over 10 years. Multiple methods and informants were utilized to assess three major domains of competence from childhood through adolescence (academic achievement, conduct, and peer social competence), multiple aspects of adversity, and major psychosocial resources. Both variable-centered and person-centered analyses were conducted to test the hypothesized significance of resources for resilience. Better intellectual functioning and parenting resources were associated with good outcomes across competence domains, even in the context of severe, chronic adversity. IQ and parenting appeared to have a specific protective role with respect to antisocial behavior. Resilient adolescents (high adversity, adequate competence across three domains) had much in common with their low-adversity competent peers, including average or better IQ, parenting, and psychological well-being. Resilient individuals differed markedly from their high adversity, maladaptive peers who had few resources and high negative emotionality. Results suggest that IQ and parenting scores are markers of fundamental adaptational systems that protect child development in the context of severe adversity.

Risk, Vulnerability, and Protective Factors in Developmental Psychopathology

In recent years a set of concepts that had originated in the lexicon of the layman has come to exert a powerful influence on scientific research in epidemiology, psychology, and psychopathology. Risk, protective factors, stress, vulnerability, and coping are now a significant part of a scientific agenda aimed at understanding the nature of etiological, maintenance, and outcome factors that influence the course of adaptation and maladaptation in human behavior. In many respects, these concepts and the research they engender capture an essential component of the emergent field of developmental psychopathology (Sroufe & Rutter, 1984). They focus attention on the precursors of disordered and nondisordered outcomes and on the concomitant issue of continuity-discontinuity in behavior from childhood to adult psychopathology. They speak to issues related to the attributes of vulnerable and stress-resistant individuals, their environments, and the interactions that predict successful and unsuccessful adaptation. And finally, because they emphasize the need to identify the factors and processes associated with disorder, competence, and recovery, they can lead in time to a body of knowledge essential to the development of effective prevention strategies for containing mental disorders.

Stress, competence, and development: continuities in the study of schizophrenic adults, children vulnerable to psychopathology, and the search for stress-resistant children.

The evolution of an ongoing research study into stress-resistant factors in children is traced from the early work on adult schizophrenia through the identification of risk factors in children vulnerable to stress. Future directions for the research are explored, including the necessity for defenses against possible politicization of the findings.

Stress, competence, and resilience: Common frontiers for therapist and psychopathologist

The joint contributions of psychotherapist and researcher to strengthening the knowledge base of psychopathology has been too often ignored in the antagonism that exists between the two camps. This article examines the contributions of both groups to the emerging science of developmental psychopathology. The role of single case observations in the origins of this multidisciplinary perspective is highlighted. The constructs of stress, coping, risk, vulnerability, and protective factors are reviewed as central themes in the formulation of research in developmental psychopathology. A research case example, Project Competence, is provided to illustrate the relevance of these concepts in studying the factors that influence the quality of adjustment in children and adolescents. The implications of such research findings for therapeutic interventions and future research on stress-resistance are discussed, with emphasis on the benefits to be gained by both therapist and researcher from the study of risk and protective factors in the development of competence and psychopathology.

Attentional processes in adult schizophrenia and in children at risk.

IN HIS classic volume on Dementia Praecox or The Group of Schizophrenias, BLEULERI addressed the problem of attention in schizophrenic patients. As always, he wrote with that acute clinical perceptiveness so characteristic of his contributions to an understanding of schizophrenic processes: “As a partial phenomenon of affectivity attention is affected with it by deterioration. Insofar as interests are extant-in milder cases this means for the majority of events, in severe cases at least for the emotionally charged activity. . . attention appears to be normal at least according to our present methods of observation. However, where affect is lacking, there will also be lacking the drive to pursue the external and internal processes, to direct the path of the senses and the thoughts; i.e. active attention will be lacking. Passive attention is altered in an entirely different manner. On the one hand it is evident that the uninterested or autistically encapsulated patients pay very little attention to the outer world. On the other hand, however, it is remarkable how many of the events which the patients seem to ignore are registered nevertheless. The selectivity which normal attention ordinarily exercises among the sensory impressions can be reduced to zero so that almost everything is recorded that reaches the senses. Thus, the facilitating as well as the inhibiting properties of attention are equally disturbed.” (p. 68). Bleuler had recorded that defect in information processing that 50 years later was to become the focus for models of attentional dysfunction in schizophrenia-models that were to emphasize such hypothetical constructs as stimulus input dysfnnction, aberrant filter mechanisms, defective selective attention, stimulus overload, etc. The high drama of this dysfunction has been captured in the clinical observations and recordings made by MCGHIE and CHAPMAN~ (cited in MCGHIE”) in their studies of attentional difficulties in acute schizophrenic patients :

Broadening Research on Developmental Risk

Risk research, with its roots in epidemiology, is concerned with the identification of factors that accentuate or inhibit disease and deficiency states, and the processes that underlie them. Risk studies run the gamut from individual case histories to cross-sectional, and short-term and lengthier longitudinal investigations. The studies traverse the entire life span from birth to old age, with foci that include a broad range of risk factors. These include etiological studies emphasizing potential biological and behavioral precursors; personal positive and negative predispositional attributes; genetic and environmental influences on disorder; the actualizing power of stressful experiences; the ameliorating force of identifiable “protective” factors; the study of coping patterns, including their origins, development, and situational contexts; and the evaluation of outcomes ranging from signs of severe biobehavioral and social deficits to patterns of resilience and adaptation amid disadvantage.

The role of competence in the study of children and adolescents under stress

“Stress” and “coping” have virtually become paired associates in numerous titles of books, chapters, and journal articles (e.g., Antonovsky, 1979; Compas, 1987; Compas, Malcarne, & Fondacaro, 1988; Field, McCabe, & Schneiderman, 1985; Garmezy & Rutter, 1983; Holroyd & Lazarus, 1982; Lazarus & Folkman, 1984; Milgram, 1986; Roth & Cohen, 1986). By comparison, the linkage of “stress” and “competence” is a less common pairing. The term “competence” refers to those skills, capacities, and knowledge that enhance cognitive, social, and emotional adaptation (see White, 1979; Garmezy, Masten, Nordstrom, & Ferrarese, 1979). It is the central theme of this chapter that it is more productive to integrate the competence construct in studying adaptation to stress than to employ the more elusive and unstable formulations of coping. Three sections of this chapter seek to justify this somewhat atypical viewpoint.

A Factorial, Reliability, and Validity Study of the Devereux Elementary School Behavior Rating Scale

This investigation explored the factor structure, reliability, and validity of the Devereux Elementary School Behavior Raring Scale, employing a large (n = 648) sample of children. Factor analysis suggested that the Devereux scale can be described by four factors, which were named Disruptive—Oppositional, Poor Comprehension—Disattention, Cooperative—Initiating, and Performance Anxiety. All four factors showed high internal consistency, and three of the four were stable over a 17-mo. period. Correlations of the four factors with academic achievement, IQ, socioeconomic status, and peer ratings of social competence are presented. All four factors showed significant relations with these variables, with Poor Comprehension—Disattention the strongest of all. Multiple regression analysis indicated that the Poor Comprehension—Disattention factor accounted for significant variance in academic achievement even after IQ was taken into account. Large differences between classroom means on the factor scores suggested that Devereux ratings for individual students may need to be interpreted cautiously.