Neuroimaging of resilience to stress: current state of affairs

Resilience is defined as a dynamic, multidimensional process encompassing positive adaptation within the context of significant adversity. The complex nature of this construct makes it a difficult topic to study in neuroimaging research; however, in this article, we propose ways to operationalize resilience. The limited amount of structural and functional neuroimaging studies specifically designed to examine resilience have mainly focused on investigating alterations in regions of the brain involved in emotion and stress regulation circuitry. In the future, neuroimaging of resilience is expected to benefit from functional and structural connectivity approaches and the use of novel imaging task paradigms. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.