**2.2 The concept of resilience and its implications**

In recent years, resilience of neighborhood has become a buzz word. A Google search scores 219 million hits. In the Dutch public administration and societal sectors, resilience gets on the agenda [7, 8]. We want to take up this concept in a way that it can be assigned to social progress. This conception is proposed in motivational and development psychology by Block and Block [9], Carver [10], and Luthar et al. [11]. These authors deviate from the mainstream of research in which resilience is specifically related to overcoming events of adversity [12, 13]. Resilience does not only involves bouncing back to the original state [14, 15], but moreover, to an improved level capability and adjustment to the social and physical environment.

Carver holds that this surpassing of the original state, termed psychological thriving, reflects gains in skills, knowledge, confidence, or a sense of security in personal relationships. He assumes further, that 'personal differences in confidence and mastery are self-perpetuating and self-intensifying' ([10], p. 245). This an example of psychological reinforcement. People are more likely to surpass to an improved level, when they map and oversee the situation of the downturn and conceive a developmental challenge for themselves [10]. When unexpected problems occur during some action, one is forced to learn more than one has learned before. Hence, people develop new courses of action, they will be more flexible in coping with new, unknown events. These flexibilities can even build on each other ([10], p. 252). However, the transfer of the attainments by resilience from one domain to another is not a matter of course [16].

In his explanation, Carver emphasizes that resilience requires both processing of negative information on the situation as a search for opportunities that helps to find a way out. In a social ecological account, resilience is predominantly related to opportunities for personal growth ([13], p. 14). In contrast, another social ecologist definines resilience as 'as a relative resistance to environmental risk experiences, the overcoming of stress or adversity, or a relatively good outcome despite risk experiences ([17], p. 34). Following Carver's argument, the analysis and understanding of the risk experience is a necessary element of resilience, because it promotes learning of the interaction with the social and physical environment and prevents a falling back into similar situations of adversity and stress. In this purport, we would like to

#### *An Explorative Perspective on the Resilience in Neighborhoods in the Netherlands DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.98818*

substitute 'despite risk experience' by 'due to understanding of the risk experiences' in the definition of Rutter.

Although fostering communities do contribute to resilience of individuals, we prefer to study resilience *in* neighborhoods instead of resilience of neighborhoods. Rutter states: 'It is certainly appropriate to conceptualize influences at a community level, but resilience as an outcome is still better viewed in terms of individual outcomes' ([17], p. 35).

Ungar criticizes a simple model of an individual who overcomes adversity by his personal faculties for resilience. Instead, he has developed a formal model in which social institutions, like family, schools, and commuities determine the conditions under which a person succeeds to be resilient [13]. In contrast, we hold thatIndividual differences in personality and life histories do matter as well (see [9, 17]). When variables and measures are carefully choosen, both individual psychological properties and environmental circumstances determine in interaction whether or not and to which degree adversity is successlully overcome by persons living in stressful and disadvantaged neighborhoods [18]. Still, it is necessary to distiguish between resiliency as property of personality and resilience as process [13]. Here we chose to study resilience as a process within a holistic person-in-environment system [19].

It is remarkable that a forty year old conception of personality appears to be a variable that significantly contribute to resilience in neighborhoods [9, 18], where other personality indicators failed to be discriminating in results [13]. Block and Block have based their personality inventory on two conceptsL: ego-control and ego-resiliency. Ego-control is conceived as a continuum between the two extremes undercontrol and overcontrol. In the extremes, overcontrol is associated with diseases like depression, whereas undercontrol is related to expressions of aggression [20]. Ego-resiliency refers to the dynamic capacity of an individual to modulate his or her modal level of ego-control, in either direction, as a function of the demand characteristics of the environmental context" ([9], p. 48).

Since 1980, the study of personality research and its biological foundation has made advancements. Although the terms undercontrol and overcontrol suggest a straight linear dimension, ego-control consists of two separate dimensions and independent brain systems [21]: the behavioral-activation system (BAS) and the behavioral inhibition system (BIS). The two systems regulate the approach/avoidance reflex onto attractive respectively threatening objects and subjects in in a person's psychical and social situation. People show differing proportions of BIS and BAS [22], whereby a slightly higher level of BAS presumably supports resilience. People need some optimismic inclination in the approach of new competencies [23].

When the levels diverge considerably and the environment provides impactful aversive or attractive stimuli, either BIS or BAS will be suppressed, resulting in disinhibition repsectively deactivation. When suppression of BAS or BIS occurs, people will hardly process either negative or positive information anymore. This two dimensional brain process explains the finding by Driessen and Beerenboom that dissatisfying urban living conditions like housing defects and serious disturbances around one's house like neighbor nuissance impede the appreciation of qualitative assets and novelties in the neighborhood [24].

In addition to Gray, Boyce and Ellis have found an u-curved biological sensitivity for negative (threatening) and positive (protective) environments. People gifted with a bi-directional sensitivity and grown up with a mixture of modest encouraging and disappointing experiences, are more flexibile and have higher tolerance levels for unexpected experiences [25].

Finally, ego-resiliency is more of less equivalent to self-regulation [13]. Selfregulation is a motivational, though predominantly unconsciously operating

resource [26]. Self-regulation helps to downregulate negative affect during trailand-error cycles. With each succesfull iteration, the resource expands. However, enduring stress, for instance by working on a job beyond one's competence, the resource can be depleted [27]. At any moment, people suddenly breakdown personally, in their social relations, or deviate, at the spur of the moment, from norms of their occupational environments [28].
