Stress resilience refers to an individual's capacity for successful adaptation to acute stress, trauma or more chronic forms of adversity. Although the range of complex mechanisms that lead to resilient phenotypes is far from being fully determined, a model of resilience has begun to emerge from the study of adaptive stress responses at multiple phenotypic levels. Beginning in development, an individual's genes and their inter action with environmental factors (and perhaps with stochastic epigenetic events) shape the neural circuitry and neuro chemical function that are expressed in an observable range of psychological strengths and behaviours characteristic of resilient individuals. Various genetic polymorphisms affect a person's limbic reactivity and prefrontal-limbic connectivity, influencing their initial responses to negative or traumatic events, as well their capacity for cognitive reappraisal of those events.
