Association between Resilience and Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms among Motor Vehicle Accident Patients

Resilience has been regarded as a trait and a dynamic process with that people exposed to significant adversities and threats can achieve positive adaptation. During the past decades, studies on the association between resilience and trauma often define those who have never developed psychaitric symptoms or improved to levels of no psychiatric symptoms after trauma as resilient individuals. Based on the resilience theory, the main purpose of our study was to investigate the association between posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and resilience in motor vehicle accident (MVA) survivors. We expected to understand the dynamic process of resilience and verify whether resilience could help to alleviate PTSD symptoms and enhance quality of life. This study first examined the psychometric properties of the Chinese versions of Acute Stress Disorder Scale (ASDS) and Resilience Scale (RS). Participants were recruited from the National Taiwan University Hospital. One hundred and twenty two participants who had undergone MVA were administered with the Chinese versions of RS, ASDS, Posttraumatic Diagnosis Scale (PDS), Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II), Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), NEO-FFI Neuroticism and Extraversion subscales, and Quality of life scale (QOL) within three month after the MVA. Results indicated satisfactory psychometric properties for the Chinese ASDS and RS. There was no significant correlation between injury severity and PTSD symptoms. Females had more anxiety and depressive symptoms than males. Moreover, pre-MVA resilience correlated negatively with depressive symptoms and positively with quality of life, but did not correlate with acute stress and anxiety symptoms. However, there was a curvilinear relationship between pre-MVA resilience and PTSD symptoms, suggesting that individuals who possessed high and low level of resilience before MVA tended to experience more PTSD symptoms. The pre-post MVA change score of resilience had negative correlation with hyperarousal, anxiety, and depressive symptoms, and had positive correlation with QOL. The limitations and implication of these findings are discussed, and recommendation for future research direction is thus suggested.