Resilience in Developmental Science: A Case for Hormesis

Resilience refers to the ability of individuals to thrive in the face of adversity. Extant research shows that resilience is a process that emerges amidst a constellation of risk and protective factors that dynamically transact with each other at multiple levels of analyses. To date, the lion’s share of research on resilience in psychological science has shown risk and protective factors to either impede or support resilience, respectively. Some research is beginning to suggest that resilience develops in response to adversity. However, scarce conceptual frameworks exist to examine the beneficial effects of adversity on resilience. Drawing on the work of various disciplines, I propose that the study of resilience in developmental and psychological sciences can benefit from considering how biomedical disciplines identify the types and dose of adversity that strengthen or impede resilience. Specifically, I discuss how dose-response curvilinear patterns lead to an inoculation effect in the context of specific, circumscribed environmental toxicity, a process that leads to hormesis in the field of toxicology. Thus, the main goal of the paper is to propose that testing for hormesis will contribute to an empirically testable inoculation model of resilience in developmental science.