In psychological terms, resilience is the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, tragedy, continuing stress, or traumatic events. The resilience of individuals is determined by their ability to successfully master difficult situations and to emerge from crises without suffering permanent damage to their wellbeing. Resilient people are mentally healthier and less susceptible over the long term to psychological problems, such as depression or Burnout.
The purpose of DynaMORE (Dynamic MOdelling of REsilience) is to develop a computer model of resilience that can be personalized to provide support to individuals who are in difficult stages of their lives or who have experienced trauma. "We want to ensure the model is capable of using individual information to learn what susceptibilities and protective mechanisms the person has and to determine how robust these actually are," explained prject coordinator Professor Raffael Kalisch, Mainz University Medical Center. For this purpose the researchers need to determine as precisely as possible which stress factors an individual is exposed to and how these influence, for example, neural, biological, and cognitive functions.
They will thus initially concentrate on discovering how resilience mechanisms work. "Assuming we are able to do this, we can then design a computer model that it is capable—through a smartphone app, for example—of providing personalized recommendations to users that will help improve their resilience and prevent stress-related psychological problems." In other words, the plan is to first better understand the phenomenon of psychological resilience and then, using the insights obtained, develop a tool that will contribute towards enhancing it. In the ideal case, this tool would give users advice on how to better deal with difficult situations. It could, for example, motivate them to adopt more positive thought processes or alternative behavior Patterns.
The EU project runs for 60 months and will be funded with a total of EUR 6 million. Of this, EUR 1 million will go to the University Medical Center of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. A total of twelve partners are cooperating in the project, including the Universities of Berlin, Freiburg, Leuven (BE), Nijmegen (NL), Tel Aviv, Warsaw, Zurich, the Flemish-Dutch Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre IMEC research center, and concentris research management GmbH in Fürstenfeldbruck. It is hoped that some 500 study subjects can be recruited for the purposes of the Project.
