PSYCHOLOGICAL RESILIENCE AND NEUROCOGNITIVE PERFORMANCE IN A TRAUMATIZED COMMUNITY SAMPLE

Background: Whether psychological resilience con-elates with neurocognitive performance is largely unknown. Therefore, we assessed association between neurocognitive performance and resilience in individuals with a history of childhood abuse or trauma exposure. Methods: In this cross-sectional study of 226 highly traumatized civilians, we assessed neurocognitive performance, history of childhood abuse and other trauma exposure, and current depressive and PTSD symptoms. Resilience was defined as having >= 1 trauma and no current depressive or PTSD symptoms; non-resilience as having >= 1 trauma and current moderate/severe depressive or PTSD symptoms. Results: The non-resilient group had a higher percentage of unemployment (P = .006) and previous suicide attempts (P < .0001) than the resilient group. Both groups had comparable education and performance on verbal reasoning, nonverbal reasoning, and verbal memory. However; the resilient group performed better on nonverbal memory (P = 016) with an effect size of .35. Additionally, more severe childhood abuse or other trauma exposure was significantly associated with non-resilience. Better nonverbal memory was significantly associated with resilience even after adjusting for severity of childhood abuse, other trauma exposure, sex, and race using multiple logistic regression (adjusted OR = 1.2; P = .017). Conclusions: We examined resilience as absence of psychopathology despite trauma exposure in a highly traumatized low socioeconomic, urban population. Resilience was significantly associated with better nonverbal memory, a measure of ability to code, store, and visually recognize concrete and abstract pictorial stimuli. Nonverbal memory may be a proxy for emotional learning which is often dysregulated in stress-related psychopathology, and may contribute to our understanding of resilience. Depression and Anxiety 27:768-774, 2010. (C) 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc.