Neuroimaging correlates of psychological resilience: an Open Science systematic review and meta-analysis.

Abstract

Introduction: While risk factors have been identified for numerous psychiatric disorders, many individuals exposed to these risk factors do not develop psychopathology. A growing neuroimaging literature has sought to find structural and functional brain features that confer psychological resilience against developing psychiatric disorders.

Methods: We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies associated with psychological resilience. Searches of Pubmed, Embase, Web of Science and PsychInfo yielded 2,658 potentially relevant articles published 2000-2021. Of these, we identified 154 human neuroimaging articles which provided anatomical coordinates of regions promoting resilience against psychiatric disorders including PTSD (44% of articles), schizophrenia (18%), major depressive disorder (14%) and bipolar disorder (12%).

Results: Meta-analysis conducted in GingerALE identified three regions as promoting psychological resilience across disorders (cluster-level FWE p < 0.05): left amygdala, right amygdala, and anterior cingulate.

Discussion: We additionally introduce a novel framework for conducting systematic reviews and meta-analyses that is compliant with best practices of Open Science: our publicly viewable systematic review was curated and annotated using the open-source reference manager Zotero, with customizable Python scripts for extracting curated data for meta-analyses. Our methodological pipeline not only permits independent replication of our findings but also supports customization for future neuroimaging meta-analyses.