Enhancing Cognitive Resilience in Adolescence and Young Adults: A Neuroscience-informed Approach

Resilience, as a trait, process, or outcome, is an important factor to explain behavioral diversity between individuals and population groups in face of stress and adversity. Individuals and groups who can bounce back shorty after stressful events, experience less severe negative emotions (depression, anxiety) and manage situations through efficient problem-solving strategies are categorized as resilient. Enhancing populations’ and individuals’ resilience becomes a central strategy for prevention of maladaptive behaviors, especially among adolescents. Several psychosocial interventions, mostly taking a positive psychology approach, improve resilience and reduce disruptive behaviors (e.g., using illicit drug and alcohol or self-harm behaviors) among adolescents. However, the role of brain awareness and training interventions targeting cognitive underpinning of resilience is not fully explored. In this chapter, we firstly review the existing literature and address the interventions that indirectly increase cognitive resilience among school-aged adolescents. Then we introduce the Promoting Cognitive Resilience (ProCoRe), a new multi-modal cognitive resilience training program, that taps different cognitive functions that are documented to be effective in the neuroscience literature. Clinical and public health implications of the ProCoRe as a prevention program to empower adolescents to avoid high risk behaviors in face of stressful through effective emotion regulation and impulse control. are discussed.