Evolutionary Psychology of Resilience

Abstract

Dealing with environmental stressors is a basic part of life for any organism. Positive psychology focuses largely on the topic of resilience and how people can move past difficult situations and interactions. The evolutionary perspective has much to offer in terms of the topic of resilience. This chapter describes resilience and stress reactions from an evolutionary perspective. Further, this chapter uses the concept of natural selection as a model for how failures are to be expected and how success in any domain for any organism owes largely to a long string of failures. This model is used to help provide evolution-based guidance on the topic of moving forward after setbacks and developing a resilient approach to life.