Resilience

Traditionally resilience is viewed as an important way of coping: Through resilience, an individual recovers from or avoids negative outcomes from burdensome conditions. In this paper, we argue that individual stability under significant adverse conditions (i.e., resilience) results, to a large degree, from coping processes (e.g., assimilation and accommodation) influenced by personal and situational conditions. Moreover, we propose that resilience, viewed as a stabilizing constellation, should be considered an important part of the conceptual bridge between coping and development. Resilience, however, requires a definition of successful development. Here, we argue that the potential and possibility for further development may be used as a common denominator of current proposals. The aim is to outline an integrative model of coping, resilience, and development as a theoretical access to successful aging. Some empirical results illustrate the developmental conditions for assimilative and accommodative processes.