BACKGROUND
Psychological resilience, one’s ability to adapt to adversity or life stressors, is hypothesized to rely on intact mechanisms of cognitive control (CC), i.e., the mental abilities that underlie our goal-directed behavior. These CC mechanisms may further help with emotion regulation during stressful periods. However, CC abilities may fluctuate, and there is no research to date on the daily fluctuations of CC and mood in relation to psychological resilience.
OBJECTIVE
The goal of the current study was to examine the everyday association between inhibitory control (IC), an integral part of CC, and daily mood in relation to psychological resilience in young adults in a stressful situation.
METHODS
Data was collected from 156 male and female soldiers in a mixed-gender unit of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Participants reported their resilience at baseline. Then, during a 2-week period, participants filled out a short momentary mood assessment and completed a short IC assessment (a Go-NoGo task; GNG) twice/day using a mobile app installed on their phones. A hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was applied to examine the association between momentary IC and mood for each participant.
RESULTS
A total of 1,153 assessment points (Mean [M] = 7.49, standard deviation [SD] = 2.95) were completed by participants, for an overall compliance rate of 57.6%. The HLM analysis showed that psychological resilience at baseline moderated the relationship between IC and mood, such that better IC was associated with better mood only for those with higher, but not lower, levers of self-reported psychological resilience at baseline. This association was present only for female, but not for male, participants in our sample.
CONCLUSIONS
To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to demonstrate that psychological resilience is manifested in the everyday association between inhibitory control and mood. Hence, these findings provide an ecological validation for the definition of resilience, as measured in young adults during a stressful life period. These results therefore lend important support to cognitive models of resilience and may have significant contribution to our understanding of resilient behavior in real life and to potential ecological interventions designed to improve resilience.
CLINICALTRIAL
MOH_2018-06-13_002451