981 words in a 5-minute read
Why looking at resilience? 🤔
Do you remember those mental health campaigns you walked pass on the street, or some random positive articles you come across on social media that teach you how to deal with stress? Then you might be familiar with the word ‘resilience’.
I believe you have been bombarded with the idea of staying resilient or having resilience is important, and we throw around the word at the slightest inconvenience. Since we use this word so much in daily lives, we must be clear of what it means, right? Sadly, that is not the case, even the psychologists cannot agree on a single definition of resilience. A standard definition of resilience is ‘the ability to adapt successfully to stress’, well, it doesn’t seem to explain anything right? This could mean so many different things and is subjective to the people.
The obscure definition is a big problem for research around resilience. Plus, how do we know if one person is more resilient than others, and how does resilience work? Surely, we can ask them to fill in questionnaires, but these subjective measures alone are not reliable enough to draw a conclusion. Therefore, in order to understand how exactly resilience works, I decided to look at another objective measure that is not affected by the subjective view of people, and that is the body’s response to stress. Our body does a lot of things when facing stress, and I focused on people’s changes in heart beat when participating in a stress task. By looking at how resilience predicts the changes in heart rate in different stages of a stress task, we can understand more about how exactly resilience works, does it make our heart rate lower even before we are stressed, does it make us react less intensely to stress, or does it make us recover faster from stress? Or can it be a combination of the above?
What I did
48 UCL psychology students took part in my study, and I asked them to do a stress test after filling in a questionnaire that measured their level of resilience. The stress task required them to give a short speech to persuade me on a topic I gave them, followed by solving maths problems under a time limit. You might be feeling stress just by reading this, I guess this would be stressful to most people.
I measured the heart rate of the participants throughout the task, and recorded the heart rate during the three stages of the stress task:
- Baseline heart rate: the heart rate before the stress task, when the participants were responding to the questionnaire
- Peak heart rate: the maximum heart rate during the stress task
- Recovery heart rate: the speed of which their heart rate returned to baseline
What I found
In short, I did not find a significant relationship between resilience and any of the heart rate changes at the three stages. In other words, it appears that in my experiment, resilience is not related to the changes in heart rate during the stress task. However, I did find some trend of data that seems to suggest that when comparing the change in heart rate to baseline, those participants with higher resilience have lower increase in heart rate during the stress task where they show their peak heart rate, and bigger decrease in heart rate during recovery period. Although this trend is not statistically significant, it definitely should not be overlooked. Moreover, there was a counterintuitive finding where the baseline heart rate for participants with higher resilience is actually higher than those with lower resilience
Why do the results matter
Although the results are statistically non-significant, this does not undermine what we can get from them! An interesting finding of this study is that those with higher resilience actually exhibits higher resting heart rate, which is against the previous studies where resilience should indicate better physical ability to deal with stress. However, this can imply that our rating of resilience through questionnaires might not represent the actual physical ability to adapt to stress. This means that we might think we can deal with and recover from stress, but our body might say the opposite.
In addition, the lack of significant findings can suggest that heart rate might not be a suitable measure for researching resilience and stress, since heart rate is not the direct outcome of stress — the changes can be caused by many things and not stress alone! So that’s two important implications we can get from the results, although they are non-significant.
Limitations
Of course, no experiment is perfect, and this one is no exception. This experiment did not control for the potential factors which may have affected the changes in heart rate during a stress task, since factors such as physical fitness and experience in public speaking could have affected how their heart rate changes in response to the specific stress task.
Also, there is an issue with the small sample size. Although this criticism can be applied to most of the small-scale experiments, it is particularly important in this experiment because we found a subtle trend that was not statistically significant, and the findings could have been different if we had more participants.
What is the next step
In order to further break down how exactly does resilience work, we should be using a full range of different physical measures of stress, such as hormonal changes, respiratory changes and muscle tension. Also, we should use a range of tests as well, the one we used in this experiment was about social stress, which does not capture the full picture of the stress we feel every day. In addition, it would be interesting for future studies to explore whether there is a difference between how resilient we think we are vs the actual physical response to stress.
References:
Birkett, M. A. (2011). The Trier Social Stress test protocol for inducing psychological stress. Journal of Visualized Experiments, (56). https://doi.org/10.3791/3238
Nartova-Bochaver, S., Korneev, A., & Bochaver, K. (2021). Validation of the 10-item Connor–Davidson Resilience Scale: The case of Russian youth. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.611026
Rutten, B. P., Hammels, C., Geschwind, N., Menne‐Lothmann, C., Pishva, E., Schruers, K., van den Hove, D., Kenis, G., van Os, J., & Wichers, M. (2013). Resilience in mental health: Linking psychological and neurobiological perspectives. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 128(1), 3–20. https://doi.org/10.1111/acps.12095