Much of the psychiatric literature indicates that stress resilience requires effective regulation of negative emotion, and continued capacity for positive emotion. This model heavily influences our understanding of affective disorders. However, emerging evidence suggests that the picture is more complex, and that boosting emotion regulation circuits may even be harmful in some cases. Neural circuits supporting stress resilience change over the course of recovery, and certain features are adaptive in some individuals but not in others. We conceptualize these differences in terms of brain circuit-level tradeoffs.

Prior to trauma, SN engagement during rest or conflict processing predicts later stress-susceptibility, but post-trauma SN engagement consistently predicts a resilient adaptation to stress [1]. It may be that individuals with trait-like low SN engagement are resilient, but are also more likely to upregulate SN following a major stressor.

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