Stress Response

Resilience has received much attention as the ability to recover from psychological trauma. Hirano (2010) took a dualistic view of resilience factors that lead to resilience as “dispositional factors” and “acquisitional factors”. In this study, we used Hirano’s (2010) classification to examine the correlation between decentering, which is distancing oneself from negative thoughts by viewing them as temporary events in the mind, and the dispositional and acquisitional factors of resilience. A link to a questionnaire created by Google Forms was distributed to 98 university students recruited through snowball sampling, and they answered the questions. The results showed that decentering was positively correlated with dispositional and acquired resilience factors. The results indicate that the skill of distancing oneself from negative thoughts is related to both inborn mental resilience and mental resilience that can be acquired through training. The results provide clues for interventions that can effectively increase resilience, which varies from person to person. We also examined the correlation between decentering and stress response and its subscales of depression/anxiety, anger/grumpiness, and apathy. The results showed that decentering was negatively correlated with stress response and its subscales. These results suggest that decentering may lead to the suppression of various stress responses such as anger and apathy as well as depression and anxiety.