Enhancing Performance Under Stress: Stress Inoculation Training for Battlefield Airmen
Download 339 Kb. View original pdf
|
| Related But Different Concepts In addition to our primary focus on SIT, we also reviewed research on several constructs related to stress inoculation, including resilience and toughening. Each of these constructs has a slightly different focus for building tolerance to stress. Resilience The term resilience refers to the ability or strength of an individual to endure or recover from a stressful or traumatic event. Much early work on resilience focused on the ability of children to overcome trauma or stress associated with difficult childhoods. Following this initial interest in the s, research has expanded to identify factors that also promote resilience in adults following a crisis (e.g., terrorist attack) (Bonanno, Westphal, and Mancini, 2011) and in military personnel and their families who are routinely faced with stressors related to military life Meredith et al., 2011). These most recent attempts to adapt research to military contexts emphasize the importance of prevention rather than the treatment of stress symptoms and disorders. In an extensive review of factors that promote resilience, Meredith et al. (2011) identified four primary categories of important factors (1) individual-level factors (e.g., positive coping, positive affect, positive thinking, realism, behavioral control, physical fitness, and altruism, (2) family-level factors (e.g., emotional ties, communication, support, closeness, nurturing, and adaptability, (3) unit-level factors (e.g., positive command climate, teamwork, and cohesion, and (4) community-level factors (e.g., belongingness, cohesion, connectedness, and collective efficacy. In reviewing this research, it is clear that some resilience factors are consistent with and would overlap an SIT approach to enhance performance under stress (e.g., behavioral control others are more relevant to promoting general psychological health and well-being (e.g., emotional ties with family. Consequently, we focus on those cognitive and behavioral skills that directly support performance enhancement under stress. 14 Enhancing Performance Under Stress Stress Inoculation Training for Battlefield Airmen Download 339 Kb. Share with your friends:
|