Can People Benefit From Acute Stress? Social Support, Psychological Improvement, and Resilience After the Virginia Tech Campus Shootings

Abstract

People’s responses to acute stress are largely thought to comprise four prototypical patterns of resilience, gradual recovery, chronic distress, and delayed distress. Here we present evidence of an additional response pattern: psychological improvement. Female survivors of the Virginia Tech shootings ( N = 368) completed assessments before the shootings and at 2, 6, and 12 months post-shooting. Latent growth mixture modeling revealed distinct trajectories of resilience, chronic distress, delayed distress, continuous distress, and improvement. Although resilience was the most common pattern (56%–59%), a trajectory of substantial improvement in anxiety and depression symptoms also emerged among 13.2% and 7.4% of the sample, respectively. In support of this pattern, improvement was distinctively associated with marked increases in perceived social support and gains in interpersonal resources. Findings suggest a more complex understanding of the impact of mass trauma and a key role for dynamic changes in social support following acute stress.