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Biolog, biological perspectives that have
been important in the thinking about resilience from its inception.
But the tools weren't there.
What's happened over the past few decades is that there have
been advances in techniques of imaging the human brain in action.
There've been many advances in.
Genetic research, understanding how genes work and interact with experience.
And also, advances in measuring and understanding many of the neurobiological
processes that may underlie the adaptive systems that we've been talking about.
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vaccinated the first child using a cow pox material
from cow pox to protect children from against developing small pox.
So he did this first vaccination in 1876.
And this, Jenner's credited with saving many, many lives in human history,
because smallpox was one of the most devastating illnesses.
And vaccination is an example of using a milder
exposure to something in order to stimulate the immune system
to make the kind of antibodies that provide immunity for disease.
And some people think about this psychologically as well.
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Another recent biological model of protection comes from
the what's called the hygiene hypothesis.
This is the idea that modern lives may be too clean in effect that we don't
have enough exposure to micro organisms to activate and calibrate our immune system.
Human immune systems need some practice,
they need to organized to respond to the expected environment.
And if we, if you grow up with no exposure to any kind of challenges your
immune system doesn't work as well as if you have exposure to some challenges.
So, people have done very interesting research showing that children who grow up
on a farm appear to be protected from immune problems like asthma.
You know, they've been exposed to more microorganisms and they have
less reactivity to all kinds of things, but some of which cause asthma.
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There's also a genetic model of protection and this comes,
this model comes from the sickle-cell gene which causes sickle-cell anemia.
And Michael Rutter, or Michael Rutter,
one of the pioneers in resilience has long used this as an example of
a protective effect generated by a, a particular gene combination.
If you have two of the sickle-cell alleles of this gene, that
causes the disease, which is devastating and, and a, a terrible outcome.
However if you have only one sickle-cell allele, and you live in a region of
the world like sub Saharan Africa, where there's a high risk for malaria, having
one of these alleles appears to have some sort of protective effect against malaria.
So if you live in sub Saharan Africa and
you have one sickle-cell allele that's better for
your overall life and development than if you have either zero or two.
Zero you're not as protected by from malaria and
two you're affected by a devastating disease.
And this is an example of how the same factor depending on the combination and
the context can be either, you know, very devastating or protective.
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Another genetic example of protection comes from the study of this particular
allele, a gene variant associated with a protective effect for
alcohol abuse and this particular allele causes unpleasant side effects
because of the way that the liver works to metabolize alcohol.
This gene is more common in people with Chinese, Japanese or Korean ancestry and
if people have this allele, they have symptoms like flushing or
nausea or rapid heartbeat when they ingest alcohol.
And this has a protective effect in the sense that people who don't feel well,
when they drink alcohol, are less likely to drink a lot of alcohol, and to,
you know, have develop problems with alcohol abuse.
But it's an interesting reminder that protective effects don't aren't
always experienced as positive.
This gene has a protective effect with regard to alcohol abuse, but
people don't experience it as positive when they're you know, drinking alcohol.
And I think similarly you can think about some of
the other protective experiences of children.
Many children don't appreciate at the time the discipline and
enforcement of rules by their parents.
They may be unhappy about it, but nonetheless, that kind of
parental discipline could have protective effects on their lives as a whole.
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Right now there's an active search underway for
many other kinds of genetic influences.
Either protective effects that interact with certain situations and
experiences, direct effects of genes that are positive and
protected, protective in human experience.
I'd say most of the exciting work right now is
focused on gene by, and experience interactions.
How genes work together with your experiences to
influence development either in positive or negative ways.
One of the most important areas of achievement, I think,
has been in studies of how parenting alters gene expression
in ways that help or harm young, the development of young mammals.
There's more and more research expanding this to humans but
the classic studies were done by Michael Meaney's group using rat mothers and
their pups, and what this group discovered is that the behavior of rat mothers,
high licking behavior, for example, of rat mothers caring for
their little pups, alters the gene expression in those rat pups.
And this works whether the rat pups are their own rat pups biologically, or
foster rat pups, little pups that have been put in their nest and
they're taking care of them.
And what it has, is a beautiful animal model of how parenting can have
a protective effect on the development of a young animal.
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Another exciting area currently in resilient science,
is looking at sensitivity to experience.
It's been widely observed that there are a lot of
individual differences in the way people respond to the same kind of adversity.
Some people seem very sensitive, some people seem much less sensitive to good or
bad experiences, and this has gone by different names in the science.
One approach has been to discuss differential susceptibility, and
there's group led by Jay Belsky and colleagues, and
they've called this approach in an article aptly named For Better or For Worse.
The idea that people differ, due to our biological heritage,
and genetics, in how sensitive they are to experience.
And if you are sensitive, and you have good experiences, you have a good outcome,
if you're sensitive and you have bad experiences, you have a negative outcome.
So they very same quality in an individual can result in
very different outcomes depending on experience.
Very similar idea is the idea of biological sensitivity to context.
This idea was developed and
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is written about by Tom Boyce, Ellis Obradovic and
other of their colleagues, very similar idea, some differences.
But, but, but what both of these research domains illustrate is that
the same biological attribute may make you
sensitive to experience either in a good or a bad way.
So, this has really had a transformational effect on how we
think about intervention because the children who appear to be doing
very poorly in an adverse situation maybe sensitive to experience.
And if we provide them with positive opportunities and
intervention, the same children who are struggling in a negative environment,
may respond beautifully to intervention.
So it's a great deal of excitement about figuring out how to
measure sensitivity to experience,.
How it develops and changes, there may be,
well be periods of a life course when we're more sensitive to experience.
It could be that, you know,
adverse experiences themselves, adversity triggers greater sensitivity.
We're trying to learn about it and
many scientists are exploring this whole new area.
And there's additional work going on on, in,
in the neurobiology of resilience at different levels from the molecular level,
and the genetic level, to the neuro level in the brain.
Two neuro endocrine systems, and how the biology of stress works in our body.
I think we're going to see more and
more research coming together to explain the neurobiology of how some
of the powerful adaptive systems work that we've been talking about in this course.
How the attachment system works at a biological level.
How motivation works.
How self control works and develops.
How cognitive skills regulate behavior, and what we can do to enhance the and
understand these adaptive systems in order to put them to work,
to promote resilience and understand them at different levels of analysis,
from the biological to the behavioral and social level.
Ann S. Masten, Ph.D., LPRegents Professor, Irving B. Harris Professor of Child Development
