Page 17 - Biobehavioral Resilence to Stress

xvi Introduction

resilience would offer a valuable opportunity for improved preparation and

sustainability. However, this objective requires a better understanding of the

specific psychosocial and biological factors that are most relevant to stress
resilience in performance-critical operational settings.
Although the potential utility of resilience research extends well beyond
the immediate needs and concerns of military professionals and fi rst respond-

ers, it should be acknowledged that the military domain offers a uniquely
inspiring and useful model of individual and group resilience. Military orga-
nizations and communities have many decades of experience in stress man-
agement and coping. Service members and their families confront and cope
with the stresses of fear, upheaval, and loss on an ongoing and cumulative
basis, which is unimaginable to most civilians. As such, the military commu-
nity serves as a uniquely informative real-world “laboratory” for the study
of individual, organization, and community resilience to stress. Concerning

the broader scientific relevance of resilience to the study of human behavior,
there may be no more informative setting than the military community and
its members.
By the same token, military service members and their families mirror
the general population to the extent that some individuals are more resilient

to stress than others. Thus, it is of interest to the military to understand the
basis for relevant individual differences, to identify those who are likely to be

most susceptible to stress, and to develop programs that can be implemented
to promote or enhance resilience before, during, or after deployment as

needed. Anticipated benefits of resilience research and development include

prediction and prevention of operational performance defi cits, assessment
and screening, modeling and decision support, training, design and devel-
opment of countermeasures, improved operational eff ectiveness, increased
survivability, fewer psychiatric casualties, and reduced intervention and
compensation costs.

Volume Overview

The intent of this volume is to provide the reader with a useful and inter-
disciplinary state-of-the-art review of current knowledge as related to stress
resilience, with practical emphasis on the need to identify and harness criti-

cal aspects of resilience. The reader is provided with a solid foundation of
existing knowledge as the basis for practical consideration of how current
knowledge and future research might be utilized to predict, prevent, or assess
vulnerability versus resilience to stress. Drawing from the best and most cur-

rent research in their respective fields, contributing authors identify factors

that they believe are essential to a scientifically useful and behaviorally pre-

dictive understanding of resilience and offer practical recommendations on

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