LEC 4 - Adaptive Systems; Socio-cultural systems

Question 1

What is Epigenetics?

Answer 1

Epigenetics
Example: identical twins may turn out differently in life

Humanity: what makes us us? Our environment is what makes us us → nurture

Genes: an unchangeable blueprint, in you from birth, decides everything → nature
Are we a product of our genes (nature) or our environment (nurture)

Epigenetics: it means above genetics and has to do with how nature and nurture interact
Genetic expression can be physically altered
Genes you are born with are the genes you have got, but lifestyle and environmental influences such as nutrition, exercise, smoking, stress, and love greatly affect your biology. These changes can actually be observed at a DNA level.
Epigenetic changes happen throughout our lives, and our choices can make real differences in how we develop as human beings

Question 2

What is systemic resilience?

Answer 2

The characteristics of the wider socioecological system are essential to understanding resilient functioning at the individual leve

Question 3

What is the role of microsystems in systematic resilience?

Answer 3

*Attachment -One of the basic systems promoting positive adaptation

*Family support increases mental health resilience in children (Miller-Lewis et al., 2013

Question 4

How do families aid individual resilience

Answer 4

How do families aid resilience
- effective families; involved responsive, open and flexible, connected to community, active in problem solving and providing age appropriate autonomy (meaning that a child will get less responsibility than for instance an adolescent, parents adapt the way that they provide autonomy to the children depending on the developmental time period)

• reducing, but not minimizing, risk (not completely remove all risk, children need to experience how to recover from small disturbances/stress in order to learn from it and how they can solve problems on their own)
• socialize the child to different social contexts
• roles, rules and routines (mealtime routines, bedtime routines, chores, etc. and other types of social activities. these are rules that will help children realize what their role is in the system and what is expected of them, what their type of engagement should be, it is more reliable and children are able to become more resilient)
• coregulation and buffering effects (parents help buffer the effects of stress, but a small amount of stress is necessary)
• effective parenting; authoritative vs. authoritarian (the best parenting style associated with resilient functioning is authoritative: a balance of responsiveness and demandingness, very clear rules and regulations but also warmth and high expectations of children. this is contrasted to for instance styles where parents are more permissive without proper rules and boundaries or authoritative parents that are very strict and do not allow the child to explore and to make mistakes; some investigations have found that authoritative parenting might be better in very harsh or dangerous environments, for example if a child is growing up in a war zone it is much better if there are strict rules and regulations. the parenting style and effectiveness is dependant on the context in which they take place)
• need for family resilience (if the child has really good resilience capacity but the parents are suffering from mental health problems, the parents are poor, then the parents cannot help the child reach their capacity for resilience)

Question 5

What is Family Resilience?

Answer 5

focuses on adaptation to stress for the family as a whole

• communication (talking to each other, providing empathy, is thought to kind of aid family resilience)
• beliefs (refer to meaning making of stressful experiences, religious beliefs, they can foster a sense of coherence, hope and optimism)
• organization (a family that has tight connections with social cultures and structures around them is able to mobilize these social and economic resources during periods of stress or crisis, if a family can rely on the wider network around them they can show more resilience as a family)

Question 6

How to build resilient families through intervention?

Answer 6

Building resilient families → databank effectieve jeugdinterventies van het nederlandse jeugdinstituut (NJi)
different types of interventions:
- voorzorg
- bemoeizorg in de jeugdgezondheidszorg
- stevig ouderschap
for all interventions in the netherlands that we have there are some indications that they might work but there is no substantial good evidence for them yet

Question 7

What is the role of friendships as an adaptive system?

Answer 7

Adolescents learn to navigate the world more independently and start to increasingly form and maintain emotionally intimate peer relationships

Hence, peers may take on a more important role

Friendships predict resilience.

• there was found that when you look at year 1, we saw that all these kind of supports were related to better resilience (family had relationships with resilience, friendships had relationships with resilience and each of these concepts were related to itself) but we also found that family support had a negative relationship with resilience overtime (so in year 2 family support wasn’t helpful anymore), but if you had better friendships you had better resilient functioning a year later. we didn’t find that resilient functioning predicted friendships. it seems to suggest that there is something unique about friendships that helps young people build their resilience overtime (in the long term)
  - friendships predict resilient mental functioning in two independent cohorts of young people
  - resilience functioning predicts friendships but not the other way around; so it actually is the case that those who are more resilience in the younger sample
• the same concept might have a different outcome depending on the time
• a resilience factor’s beneficiary roles depends on the age of the child, the same resilience factor may or may not be beneficial in children with different ages

Question 8

What is the role of micro and chrono systems on friends and family as support to resilience?

Answer 8

*Friendship and family may support resilience, but that the beneficial role may depends on:
*the nature
*friendships vs family
*the timing of the support
*family support in childhood vs peer support in adolescence

Question 9

What are effective schools in aiding resilience?

Answer 9

Frequently identified qualities of effective schools and classrooms include:
*Positive school climate
*Effective classroom teachers
*Reduce disruptive behaviour
*Promote learning
*Engaged students and parents
*Parallel with risk & resilience in familie

learning to read, mathematics, writing are all very important for adult roles in society, but within learning these tasks are also the behaviors required for resilience such as self-regulation and regulation of attention and emotion, executive functioning such as planning behavior and reducing your impulses, the motivation to sit down and learn, in kind of just teaching the normal day to day things we are already helping young children build resilience

Question 10

How can Schools build resillience?

Answer 10

How can schools build resilience
- cognitive development (building skills that are necessary for later life, executive functioning)
- nutrition and health care programs for low-income students
- positive relationships
- increased self-efficacy as well as the achievement motivation of their students
- access to a wide variety of opportunities to develop skills, leadership, and experience mastery in activities

Question 11

What is the role of communities, cultures and societies in resilience?

Answer 11

Society provides various policies and practices to support families, with cultures and religions transmitting ideas and traditions for life and dealing with difficulties. These customs can be ingrained and teach compassion, forgiveness, and honesty, which are crucial for resilience and meaning-making. Communities also provide practical necessities like clean water, public safety, medical facilities, and emergency services. Countries with better welfare support foster resilience in children, regardless of their nationality.

Question 12

What is culture’s role in resilience?

Answer 12

-** “acculturation stress”** can arise from the perceived difficulties of dealing with cultural differences
- **‘survival’ **of children depends to some degree on acceptance, support, and investment of the community. thus, it can be essential for children to conform to community expectations and definitions of good behavior
- Cultural differences in community expectations and definitions of good behaviour

Question 13

What is the Immigrant Paradox and its role in resilience?

Answer 13

• the immigrant paradox; first-generation immigrant youth may be more successful or healthier than later-born generations
• in effect for success and resilience
• first generation holds more strongly to cultural practices in diet, child rearing, and values that promote health or achievement

Question 14

What is the role of cultural niche in resilience?

Answer 14

• cultural niche: children developing in different cultural niches might be expected to learn different competences and coping strategies for dealing with stress, ideas about desirable behavior, and ways of caring for their own children

Question 15

What is the role of cultural continuity in relation to resilience? (Aboriginals, Kirmayer 2000)

Answer 15

(Kirmayer et al., 2000)
→ looked at a group of aboriginals in canada and found that this group had really high suicide rates and wanted to do something about it. as a way of meeting these individuals the local authorities had spoken with these groups and they had come to the solution that they would be given more control in terms of their police and fire services, education, health, all the local facilities. they were now actively involved in policy making and activities of these facilities and that is what we call ‘cultural continuity’: for a certain culture to have an active say in how it uses its infrastructure. the level of cultural continuity was related with a reduction of suicide rates when compared to communities that did not have cultural continuity in its health services.

Question 16

What is the relation between community attitudes and resilience?

Answer 16

whether or not children are accepted (after war) back into society is dependent on how the community responds to them

• in Sierra Leone, higher levels of community acceptance were linked to lower levels of emotional distress among war affected youth (Betancourt et al., 2014)
• higher levels of social support were associated with increased adaptive and pro social behaviors and attitudes (Betancourt et al., 2010)
• social support (reduced stigmatization and racism) predictor of improved mental health for former child soldiers in Nepal (Adhikari et al. 2014)

why are children involved in war: abduction, threatened or coerced or manipulated, driven by poverty, sold by families, etc.
the way a community welcomes children back really matters for the young person’s ability to partake in society and to show good mental health and wellbeing

Question 17

What is Developmental systems theory? Masten 2019

Answer 17

(Masten, 2019)
***Developmental Systems Theory: a person’s development is affected by the complex interactions of several systems external to the individual, embedded in multiple ecological layers. **

Response to adversity in an individual might depend on resilience that exists within all these different layers, it also means that all these systems are interconnected (such as physical stress in the form of illness might impact the irritability of an individual which in turn might impact their social skills and ability to pay attention in school which might evoke negative reactions from the teacher which will further evoke, etc.)

*Competence or achievements depend on age and time-dependent stages.
for example the effects of friendships. and might be dependent on the time and context in which it takes place)

Question 18

What is Skin Deep Resilience

Answer 18

in young people from high risk backgrounds that were showing academic competence in early adolescence and really good mental health and well-being. But at the same time, when the individuals looked at their body. They had really high blood pressure and high body mass index, and those are actually related to vulnerability but not resilience. So you can have resilience in terms of how you act, but at the same time that might come at a cost in terms of how your body is able to kind of deal with all these stressors. And that is something that we call skin deep resilience, meaning that your resilience goes only so far as your skin.

Question 19

What is Developmental Systems Theory (Lecture)

Answer 19

• recognizing that resilience processes may take place at the level of the individual, family, organization, town, society, etc., has several implications.
  1. protective processes may take place at any level.
  2. the family, organization, or society itself may demonstrate resilient functioning.
  3. these different levels are interconnected and embedded within each other, creating adaptational systems within adaptational systems.

Resilience can therefore never be stable in individuals. it also means there are many different things that we can do, as a society, to shape resilience in young children (intervene in family level, intervene in school level, intervene in policy level) all these things can have detrimental effects on a young person’s ability to handle stress. but things such as war and bullying may also have detrimental consequences on the children, such that a resilient child requires a resilient family and a resilient school and a resilient society. resilience isn’t a set thing, you can have resilience in for example one domain but not in another domain. so children can have resilience in academic achievement but no resilience in mental health.

So if all these things kind of rely on differential systems, then it means that there is no one such thing as resilience, but it also means that resilience now doesn’t necessarily predict resilience in the future. So children who are resilient now don’t don’t necessarily need to don’t necessarily show resilience in the future, but it also shows the flip side of that. If you are vulnerable now, if you have mental health problems now, it doesn’t mean that you’re set for life. But it becomes much more complicated because there are also these.