Stress, Physical Activity, and Resilience Resources: Tests of Direct and Moderation Effects in Young Adults

Stress is an important consideration for understanding why individuals take part in limited or no physical activity (PA). The effects of stress on PA do not hold for everyone, so examinations of possible moderators that protect individuals from the harmful effects of stress are required. Aligned with a resilience framework, individual resources (e.g., hope and self-efficacy) may buffer the maladaptive effects of stress, such that people who have access to these resources in greater quantity may be more "resilient" to the deleterious effects of stress on PA. This study was designed to test this expectation. In total, 140 Australian undergraduate students (70.7% female, Mage = 21.68 ± 4.88) completed a multisection survey and provided a sample for hair cortisol concentration analysis using immunoassays. Main effects demonstrated primarily small and nonsignificant associations between perceived stress and hair cortisol concentration with different intensities of PA. Similar findings were observed between individual-level resilience resources and PA intensities, with the exception of hope (i.e., positive association with vigorous PA and negative association with sitting), self-efficacy (i.e., positive association with vigorous PA), and resilience (i.e., positive association with walking). Although certain individual-level resilience resources were perceived as beneficial for PA and sedentary time, the moderating role of resilience resources was not supported by the findings. The direct and moderating effects between stress, PA, and resilience resources require further testing using longitudinal designs in which stressful periods occur naturally (e.g., exams for students) or are experimentally manipulated

Team resilience emergence: Perspectives and experiences of military personnel selected for elite military training

We conducted a longitudinal (3-month) qualitative study to examine elite military personnel's (N = 32) experiences and perspectives of team resilience emergence following two team-oriented training courses within an 18-month high-stakes training programme where personnel are required to operate in newly formed tactical teams for extended periods. Our thematically informed interpretations of the participants’ subjective experiences of reality were constructed according to five key themes: (i) adversity is an enduring, shared experience of an event; (ii) individuals recognise adversity through physiological and/or behavioural states; (iii) social resources bind together individual self-regulatory capacities when confronted with adversity to support team functioning; (iv) shared experiences of adversity and collective structures strengthen social bonds and mental models needed for resilience emergence; and (v) behavioural processes and shared states are how collectives turn individual and team capacities into performance under adversity. These findings provide novel insights that supplement our current understanding of team resilience emergence, including the varying means by which adversity may be collectively experienced, synergies between specific forms of adversity and resilience processes or protective factors, and the unique influence of performance context (e.g., task type)

Profiles of adversity and resilience resources: A latent class analysis of two samples

© 2019 The British Psychological Society Adversities refer to events that are characterized by perceived or actual threat to human functioning. Often considered deleterious for health and well-being, recent work supports an alternative picture of the effects of adversity on human functioning, such that a moderate amount of adversity – when compared with none or high levels – can be beneficial. We extend this body of work in the current study by considering the breadth or type of adversities experienced simultaneously (referred to as polyadversity), with a focus on individual profiles of lifetime adversities. Latent class analysis was employed to explore different configurations of lifetime adversity experiences in two independent samples and examine how these latent classes differed with regard to resilience resources (i.e., optimism, hope, self-efficacy, and bounce-back ability). University students (N = 348) and members from the broader community (N = 1,506) completed measures of lifetime adversity exposure and resilience resources. Three polyadversity classes were revealed in each sample, with both producing a high and a low polyadversity class. The third class differed between samples; in the student sample, this class represented experiences of vicarious adversity, whereas in the community sample, it represented moderate levels of exposure to adversity. Support for the adaptive nature of a moderate amount of adversity exposure was found in the community sample but not in the student sample. This study produces initial evidence of how lifetime adversity experiences group together and how class membership is related to resilience resources

Team resilience: A scoping review of conceptual and empirical work

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. The purpose of this scoping review was to examine the literature on team resilience to gain insight into current thinking regarding its definition and conceptualisation, and to identify how researchers have operationalised and measured this concept. We conducted a systematic scoping review using the 5-phase approach proposed by Arksey and O’Malley. A total of seven databases were searched, followed by a citation search of eligible papers via Google Scholar. Of the 275 articles identified via the search process, 27 papers were deemed eligible for review. Several key findings regarding the literature on team resilience were observed: (i) definitions varied in terms of content (e.g. input or process), breadth (e.g. unidimensional versus multidimensional), and quality (e.g. essential and necessary attributes of key components); (ii) there was a predominance of single-level conceptualisations of team resilience; and (iii) there has been a reliance on cross-sectional research designs in empirical studies, which is incongruent with the dynamic nature of this concept. Key recommendations from this scoping review focus on definitional, theoretical, and methodological issues

The emergence of resilience: Recovery trajectories in sleep functioning after a major stressor.

There is intuitive and practical appeal to the idea of emergent resilience, that is, sustaining healthy levels of functioning or recovering quickly after some degree of deterioration following exposure to heightened risk or vulnerability. Scholars typically utilize mean levels of functioning indices to identify qualitatively distinct latent subgroups of individuals who share similar patterns of change over time. We propose and showcase an alternative, yet complementary operationalization of emergent resilience via temporal changes in within-person variability. Twenty-nine male personnel (26.25 ± 2.67 years) from the Australian Army who passed a 3-week Special Forces Selection Course provided device-based assessments of sleep functioning for seven nights immediately following course completion. Participants also provided a hair sample for cortisol analysis prior to and immediately after the selection course as an index of accumulated stress, and self-reported their adaptability prior to the 7-day monitoring period. We combined latent growth modeling with an exponential variance function to capture fluctuations around latent means and their change over time. Consistent with our conceptualization of “bounce back” emergent resilience, within-person variability in sleep duration decreased each night by around 10%, which reflects a meaningful small mean decrease over time. We also revealed differential effects of the predictor variables; biological stress primarily influenced the total sleep duration on the first night of the 7-day monitoring period, whereas adaptability largely affected temporal changes in the within-person residual variances. These findings underscore the importance of synergizing concept, operationalization, and method for the science of human resilience. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved

Cross-sectional and longitudinal comparisons of self-reported and device-assessed physical activity and sedentary behaviour

© 2020 Sports Medicine Australia Objectives: To examine the longitudinal associations and differences between self-reported and device-assessed physical activity (PA) and sedentary behaviour (SB), using a multifaceted statistical approach. Design: Longitudinal measurement burst. Methods: In total, 52 university students (78% female) aged 18–38 years (mean = 21.94 ± 4.57 years) participated. The study consisted of three blocks of six days of measurement, during which participants wore an accelerometer on their wrist for the entire block, and self-reported their PA over the 6 days at the end of each block. Results: Meaningful latent differences between methods were observed for moderate PA and SB across all three assessment periods, such that participants underreported the time spent in each activity. Bland–Altman plots revealed a positive mean difference for vigorous PA, with over-reporting increasing as mean levels increased. Negative mean differences were observed for all other intensities. Underreporting of moderate PA increased as the mean level increased, whereas for light PA and SB, underreporting decreased at high levels. Repeated measures correlations revealed a meaningful association for vigorous PA only, suggesting that as self-reported minutes increase so too do device-measured minutes. Conclusions: We found evidence of cross-sectional and longitudinal differences and weak associations between self-reported and device-assessed PA and SB. Future work is needed to enhance the quality of self-reported methods to assess PA and SB (e.g., face and content validity), and consider improvements to the processing of device-based data

Ophthalmological aspects of Pierson syndrome

PURPOSE: To study the ocular phenotype of Pierson syndrome and to increase awareness among ophthalmologists of the diagnostic features of this condition. DESIGN: Retrospective, observational case series. METHODS: A multicenter study of 17 patients with molecularly confirmed Pierson syndrome. The eye findings were reviewed and compared to pertinent findings from the literature. RESULTS: The most characteristic ocular anomaly was microcoria. A wide range of additional abnormalities were found, including posterior embryotoxon, megalocornea, iris hypoplasia, cataract, abnormal lens shape, posterior lenticonus, persistent fetal vasculature, retinal detachment, variable axial lengths, and glaucoma. There was high interocular and intrafamilial variability. CONCLUSIONS: Loss-of-function mutations in laminin beta2 (LAMB2) cause a broad range of ocular pathology, emphasizing the importance of laminin beta2 in eye development. Patients with Pierson syndrome can initially present with ocular signs alone. In newborns with marked bilateral microcoria, Pierson syndrome should be considered and renal function investigate