The Efficacy of a Resilience Intervention Among Diverse, At-Risk, College Athletes: A Mixed-Methods Study.

BACKGROUND: Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have been associated with psychological and physiological disease, and risky health behaviors. A person's ability to be resilient may protect them from these negative health outcomes, as resilience has been associated with increased emotional awareness, coping, belonging, and greater likelihood of good health and well-being. AIMS: The purpose of this pilot study was to assess the efficacy of a strengths-based resilience intervention to improve access to internal and external resources that effect perceptions of stress, resilience, emotional awareness, and belonging among student-athletes. METHODS: A mixed-methods design was used to examine variables of interest between intervention and control groups. A sample of 56 college athletes completed surveys and engaged in expressive writing during a 5-week resilience intervention. RESULTS: Self-report data indicated that student-athletes in the intervention group improved decision making, lowered perceived stress, and increased resilience compared with controls. Of note, participants with ACEs showed greater increments of positive change in emotional awareness scales than participants without ACEs. Descriptions of emotion management, authentic connections, and increased ability to request support from others were identified in the qualitative data. CONCLUSIONS: A strengths-based course designed to increase resilience-offered as academic and athletic stress is mounting-provided a unique opportunity to promote student-athlete success. Participants gained skills key to victory on and off the field, including health-promoting behaviors, a sense of belonging, persistence, and the ability to negotiate external resources.

Non-declarative representational and regulatory systems in alexithymia.

Alexithymia, originally defined as a lack of words for feelings, has generally been conceived as a cognitive deficit in emotional information processing. Structural dissociation theory hypothesizes that the full range of trauma spectrum symptoms and disorders, including an alexithymic presentation, may be related to posttraumatic disruptions in operations that integrate personality. Review of multilevel descriptive research in the areas of traumatic stress, dissociation, alexithymia, and affective neuroscience suggests that posttraumatic alexithymia may be related to trauma-specific alterations in non-declarative representational and self-regulatory operations. Similar patterns of altered neural activity have been observed in studies of traumatic stress and of alexithymia and in research on neurovisceral integration. Neuroanatomical studies of affective information processing suggest that disruption of a key non-declarative integrative operation, interoception, may be related to the declarative deficit manifest in posttraumatic alexithymia. Refinement of the alexithymia construct in line with these empirical findings and with the theory of structural dissociation is accordingly proposed. A novel heuristic, apraxithymia, defined as a procedural discoordination of the hierarchical representation and regulation of affective experience, is introduced as a reformulation of posttraumatic alexithymia. In apraxithymia, altered action of the feeling of feelings is hypothesized to underlie a manifest lack of words for feelings. Clinical implications and suggestions for further research are briefly outlined.