A Study Of Resilience In Children: From The Viewpoint Of Social Cognition

In psychological science, the term "resilience" refers to the phenomenon that some people don't suffer developmental disorders while facing or having experienced severe stresses or adversities. Three classes of resilient development have been recognized by researchers. The first class is characterized by good developmental outcomes in children from high-risk backgrounds who have overcome great odds. The second one goes that children who living in disadvantaged environment sustain competence. The third one focuses on individuals who have successfully recovered from such serious childhood trauma as war and political violence. The resilience research vanguards led a revolution in thinking about the relations between stresses/adversities and developmental outcomes. With the doubtless notion in mind of causal links from stresses/adversities to psychological or behavioral problems, researchers ever faced the challenge of resilience and gradually came to recognize that the causal links was beyond expectances as usual. In fact, when facing or after experiencing severe stresses or adversities, at one polar, some children succumb to development of psychological disorders, while at another polar, other children thrive with no psychopathological symptoms.Since the identification of resilience in 70s-80s of 20th century, more and more scholars have come to be interested in this domain. Three research waves accompanied by encouraging advancements have surged to date. But there is a fly in the ointment. The domain came to feel its several notable shortcomings fostering big obstacles to hamper the smooth progress of research. Of most representative are: lack of strong integrative research themes with unsystematic results scattering about, lag of theoretical constructs behind the empirical research, no emphasis on human agency in coping stresses/adversities. Following the new directions in developmental psychology and other psychological science related, the author makes a beneficial trial study on resilience base on social cognition.Employing framework of relations and transactional ecosystem model, the author carried out this resilience research with four dimensions of social cognition under consideration. They are stresses/adversities perception, self-perceived social competence, mind-reading capability, and interpersonal relationship cognition. The main aims of the research are: 1) to identify the features of social cognition dimensions listed above, and 2) to further test what effect the social cognition exerts on the causal links between stresses/adversities and developmental outcomes.Six studies in total were carried out by the author and the results are listed as follows.In the first study, based on the two premises to identify resilient children, the author first selected out 275 primary and middle school students (aged 8-16) who either have experienced or are experiencing severe stresses/adversities from 512 valid cases, then screened out 99 resilient children (36%) (resUient group, RG) according to the integrative indices of social functioning, and 176 nonresilient ones (nonresilient group, NRG), the ratio in accordance to some studies published. There are significant differences in frequencies among grades and between different genders. The results strongly indicate that there is a gradual but fluctuant rise in ratio of resilience following the age. From age 8-9 to 15-16, higher ratio of resilience in female students is found than that in male...