Brain scans reveal how resilient people respond differently to stress

<p>Psychological resilience protects individuals against the negative consequences of exposure to adversity. Despite increasing attention given to resilience for its role in maintaining mental health, a clear conceptualization of resilience remains elusive, and the intricacies of its neural correlates are poorly understood. Here, we recorded brain activity in healthy young adults using a 7T MRI scanner while they naturally watched two movie clips, one with neutral content and another with negative content. Stronger and more extensive neural similarity, as estimated by inter-subject correlation, was observed in response to the negative movie compared with the neutral movie. Moreover, we found that high-resilience individuals had similar neural activities to their peers, while low-resilience individuals showed more variable neural activities. A secondary analysis examined the relationship between ISCs and an additional self-report behavioral measure of interest, Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU). IU is a personality trait known to bias perception and cognition and has been proposed to be related to resilience. We found that higher IU was associated with attenuated resilience-related neural similarity in attention-related brain regions, suggesting that IU may undermine resilience by altering attentional focus toward specific aspects of the external environment. We propose that the similarity of neural responses among resilient individuals highlights adaptive emotional processing engaging multiple brain systems. Conversely, the variability in neural responses among low-resilience groups indicates vulnerability to adverse psychological outcomes. These insights shed light on the mechanisms of resilience, highlighting that it involves a constellation of neuropsychological processes crucial for adapting to external stimuli.</p>