Neuroscience has made many advances in understanding psychopathological responses to trauma. These developments have also led to promising avenues for promoting adaptation following extreme adversity. Comparable work targeting resilience has lagged behind. This chapter provides a review of the major models and evidence from a neuroscience perspective about the different ways people respond to trauma. Building on animal models, this field has learnt much about human trauma response from fear conditioning, sensitization, and memory reconsolidation models. The neural networks underpinning these processes are being mapped. Further, the roles of stress, gender, and attachment processes are being identified as key to understanding differential response to trauma. This chapter discusses how these different factors may be moderated to foster resilience. A central theme of this review is that the vast majority of evidence is inferred from studies that have compared people with and without psychiatric disorder after trauma. There is an urgent need for a more refined definition of resilience in neuroscience research that conceptualizes resilience as long-term functioning at a high level. Whereas neuroscience has shed light on many potential ways to promote resilience in people during and after adversity, there is a great need for closer study of these factors in populations that have been shown to be resilient over time and under varying conditions of stress. Only through this approach can more effective means emerge from neuroscience perspectives that can help people manage the aftermath of trauma both in the short and long terms.

Over the past several decades there has been enormous advance in the neuroscience underpinnings of how humans respond to trauma. This has led to marked improvements in how we conceptualize extreme stress reactions, such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as well as novel treatments for helping people to recover from these reactions. Much less work has targeted the issue of neuroscientific bases for resilience in the face of trauma. Nonetheless, we can learn much from neuroscience evidence about how PTSD functions in terms of understanding the directions we need to take to understand how to understand resilience, and importantly, how to foster resilience in those exposed to trauma.