Maladapted or Super-Adapted?
Maladaptive behavior is a term widely used throughout youth treatment literature and practice. Yet everyone who has worked with youth longer than three months knows that the emotions and behaviors that brought our youth into treatment are behaviors that have also kept them alive. This edition of Know Your Sheet illuminates research by Dr. Bruce Ellis and colleagues that tells us our youth aren’t maladapted, in fact they may be super-adapted, specialized to survive the environment they experience.
The Article: Beyond Risk and Protective Factors: An Adaptation-Based Approach to Resilience (2017)
Authors: Bruce J. Ellis, JeanMarie Bianchi, Vladas Griskevicius, and Willem E. Frankenhuis
Publishing Journal: Perspectives on Psychological Science
Research Agency/University: University of Utah, University of Arizona, University of Minnesota, Radboud University Nijmegen
Funding Source: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research
In a Nutshell:
This article presents youth who have experienced chronic childhood adversity as stress-adapted as opposed to maladapted. The authors examine cross-disciplinary research suggesting that harsh-unpredictable environments may augment attention, detection, learning, and problem solving relevant to those environments. Specializations adapted to context cues about the survivability of an environment. Specializations of stress-adapted youth include; increased tracking ability, enhanced emotion recognition, better empathic accuracy, enhanced threat and deception detection, and emotional contagion patterns more empathically linked to a social interaction partner.
A quote to keep:
“stress-adapted individuals have “hidden talents” that exceed the abilities of individuals growing up under more safe, stable conditions.”
Why this Article Matters to you:
Youth who have experienced harsh unpredictable environments are not maladapted; they are specialized to survive the environment they have experienced.
Stress-adapted youth are the canary in the mine, they are aware of environmental cues that signal potential threat or aggression long before others
Look for what is right with your youth, rather than what needs to be fixed
Opportunities for Immediate Application:
Use the term stress-adapted rather than maladapted when talking about youth’ emotions and behaviors
Make sure your staff know these adaptations exist in the youth they serve
Celebrate these adaptations in youth. Let youth know that they are specializations, not something to be embarrassed about
Identify that adaptation in the moment a youth expresses it and remind the youth why that adaptation has been helpful to them in their past