Attentional bias towards resilience-related words is related to post-traumatic growth and personality traits

Abstract Attentional bias towards resilience-related words could be adaptive for resilient people, by facilitating mental activation of related concepts and behaviors. We first analyzed the existence of attentional biases in processing resilience-related words. An emotional Stroop task experiment compared response latencies to resilience-positive, resilience-negative, positive non-resilience, and negative non-resilience words. We also collected measures of resilience and personality. A repeated measures ANOVA showed significantly higher latencies towards positive words and marginally significant latencies towards resilience-related ones. Participants were classified according to their percentile scores on post-traumatic growth or event-centrality. Planned comparisons revealed that those high in both measures spent more time on resilience-positive words than on resilience-negative ones. A second objective was to examine whether attentional bias towards resilience words is associated with affective personality traits. Participants classified as medium in reward responsiveness, drive, and positive affect showed this bias. These results shed light on the mechanisms underlying resilience.