Can resilience be learned? Study finds that prior stressful events can help build resilience
Faced with climate change, a pandemic, and political unrest around the globe, it can feel all too easy to succumb to a sense of hopelessness. How do some…
Faced with climate change, a pandemic, and political unrest around the globe, it can feel all too easy to succumb to a sense of hopelessness. How do some people bounce back from adversity faster than others, and can those who struggle teach themselves to be more resilient over time?
Credit: Danielle Capparella, Princeton University
Faced with climate change, a pandemic, and political unrest around the globe, it can feel all too easy to succumb to a sense of hopelessness. How do some people bounce back from adversity faster than others, and can those who struggle teach themselves to be more resilient over time?
A new study conducted in mice and published Oct. 19 in the journal Nature suggests resilience can be learned, and can even be reinforced. A team of researchers from the Princeton Neuroscience Institute placed small mice in close proximity with larger, aggressive mice and found that a display of defensive behaviors predicted the mice’s ability to be resilient after the stressful event. Further, the team found that by activating dopamine while the mice fought back, they could further reinforce resilience.
From the research’s inception, Lindsay Willmore, who earned her Ph.D. in 2022 and is lead author on the paper, was intrigued by the relatively rare subset of mice who would defend themselves tenaciously when faced with an aggressor.
“They’d turn back towards the aggressor, they’d throw their paws out, they’d jump on him, and they would just not give up,” said Willmore. “I thought, wow, there’s something going on in these guys’ brains that’s super interesting and could be the key to resilience.”
In the study, the researchers gauged resilience by monitoring the mice’s behaviors in the 10 days during which they sustained attacks by the aggressor.
The mice that tended not to defend themselves ended up displaying depression-like behaviors such as social avoidance following the stressful event. Meanwhile, the mice that fought back displayed greater resilience.
By stimulating dopamine while the mice were fighting back, the researchers found they could make the mice even more likely to become resilient. On the flip side, stimulating dopamine during avoidant behavior did not make the mice more resilient.
“It’s a complicated environment where a mouse has to decide what to do around a bully mouse,” said Ilana Witten, a professor of neuroscience and author on the study. “What decision it makes has profound consequences in terms of how it ends up.”
While the defensive stances associated with fighting back were key in predicting a mouse’s resilience in the face of attack, Willmore said, “Even more strongly related to resilience was how much dopamine the animals had in their reward system during the time when they were starting to fight back. That’s what was really cool to me — that an animal that is not just fighting back but is rewarded for fighting back is the one that becomes resilient.”
For the study, the researchers put a smaller mouse in a cage with a larger, more aggressive mouse that typically would attack its smaller cage-mate. Afterward, the two mice would stay in the enclosure but this time separated by a wall so that they could not interact physically.
“I’m very interested in the question of whether we can teach resilience,” said said Annegret Falkner, an assistant professor of neuroscience and author on the paper. The series of experiments the team conducted seemed to suggest the answer was indeed yes, that the mice could be nudged toward performing resilient behaviors.
While the researchers began the project before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Falkner said since the pandemic hit, she’s been thinking more than ever about resilience. “We need to think about ways to help the people who seem to be more susceptible to cope with the stresses of the world,” said Falkner.
As the researchers continue their studies on resilience, they hope that in the future such work could be applied beyond animals to human health. For example, devices such as smart watches could give real-time feedback about good habits to promote healthy mechanisms like resilience. “Information about our dynamic interactions with the environment will be useful for tracking our habits that might be helpful or harmful,” said Willmore.
The study was funded by the New York Stem Cell Foundation, the Esther A. and Joseph Klingenstein Fund, the Simons Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health.
The study, “Behavioral and dopaminergic signatures of resilience,” by Lindsay Willmore, Courtney Cameron, John Yang, Ilana Witten and Annegret Falkner, was published in the journal Nature on Oct. 19, 2022. DOI 10.1038/s41586-022-05328-2.
Journal
Nature
DOI
10.1038/s41586-022-05328-2
Method of Research
Experimental study
Subject of Research
Animals
Article Title
Behavioral and dopaminergic signatures of resilience
Infosys Recognized as the Top Service Provider Across Nordics in the Whitelane Research and PA Consulting IT Sourcing Study 2023
Infosys Recognized as the Top Service Provider Across Nordics in the Whitelane Research and PA Consulting IT Sourcing Study 2023
PR Newswire
STOCKHOLM, March 31, 2023
Infosys achieves a notable rise in overall ranking in the Nordics with a customer…
Infosys Recognized as the Top Service Provider Across Nordics in the Whitelane Research and PA Consulting IT Sourcing Study 2023
PR Newswire
STOCKHOLM, March 31, 2023
Infosys achieves a notable rise in overall ranking in the Nordics with a customer satisfaction score of 81 percent as compared to the industry average of 73 percent
STOCKHOLM, March 31, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Infosys (NSE: INFY) (BSE: INFY) (NYSE: INFY), a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting, today announced that it has been recognized as one of the top service providers in the Nordics, achieving the highest awarded score in Whitelane Research and PA Consulting's 2023 IT Sourcing Study. The report ranked Infosys as the number one service provider and an 'Exceptional Performer' in the categories of Digital Transformation, Application Services, and Cloud & Infrastructure Hosting Services. Infosys also ranked number one in overall General Satisfaction and Service Delivery.
For the report, Whitelane Research and PA Consulting, the innovation and transformation consultancy, surveyed nearly 400 CXOs and key decision-makers from top IT spending organizations in the Nordics and evaluated over 750 unique IT sourcing relationships and more than 1,400 cloud sourcing relationships. These service providers were assessed based on their service delivery, client relationships, commercial leverage, and transformation capabilities.
Some of Infosys' key differentiating factors highlighted in the report are:
Infosys ranked as a top provider in the Nordics across key performance indicators on service delivery quality, account management quality, price level and transformative innovation.
Infosys' ranked above the industry average by 8 percent year-on-year, making it one of the top system integrators in the Nordics.
Infosys is positioned as a "Strong Performer" in Security Services and scored significantly above average on account management.
Arne Erik Berntzen, Group CIO of Posten Norge, said: "Infosys has been integral in helping Posten Norge transform its IT Service Management capabilities. As Posten's partner since 2021, Infosys picked up the IT Service Management function from the incumbent, successfully transforming it through a brand-new implementation of ServiceNow, redesigning IT service management to suit the next-generation development processes and resulting in a significant improvement of the overall customer experience. I congratulate Infosys for achieving the top ranking in the 2023 Nordic IT Sourcing Study."
Antti Koskelin, SVP & CIO at KONE, said: "Infosys has been our trusted partner in our digitalization journey since 2017 and have helped us in establishing best-in-class services blueprint and rolling-in our enterprise IT landscape over the last few years. Digital transformations need partners to constantly learn, give ideas that work and be flexible to share risks and rewards with us, and Infosys has done just that. I am delighted that Infosys has been positioned No. 1 in Whitelane's 2023 Nordic Survey. This is definitely a reflection of their capabilities."
Jef Loos, Head of Research Europe, Whitelane Research, said, "In today's dynamic IT market, client demand is ever evolving, and staying ahead of the curve requires a strategic blend of optimized offerings and trusted client relationships. Infosys' impressive ranking in Whitelane's Nordic IT Sourcing Study is a testament to their unwavering commitment to fulfilling client demands effectively. Through their innovative solutions and exceptional customer service, Infosys has established itself as a leader in the industry, paving the way for a brighter and more successful future for all."
Hemant Lamba, Executive Vice President & Global Head – Strategic Sales, Infosys said, "Our ranking as one of the top service providers across the Nordics in the Whitelane Research and PA Consulting 2023 IT Sourcing Study, endorses our commitment to this important market. This is a significant milestone in our regional strategy, and the recognition revalidates our commitment towards driving customer success and excellence in delivering innovative IT services. Through our geographical presence in the Nordics, we will continue to drive business innovation and IT transformation in the region, backed by a strong partner network. We look forward to continuing investing in this market to foster client confidence and further enhance delivery."
About Infosys
Infosys is a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting. Over 300,000 of our people work to amplify human potential and create the next opportunity for people, businesses and communities. With over four decades of experience in managing the systems and workings of global enterprises, we expertly steer clients, in more than 50 countries, as they navigate their digital transformation powered by the cloud. We enable them with an AI-powered core, empower the business with agile digital at scale and drive continuous improvement with always-on learning through the transfer of digital skills, expertise, and ideas from our innovation ecosystem. We are deeply committed to being a well-governed, environmentally sustainable organization where diverse talent thrives in an inclusive workplace.
Visit www.infosys.com to see how Infosys (NSE, BSE, NYSE: INFY) can help your enterprise navigate your next.
Safe Harbor
Certain statements in this release concerning our future growth prospects, financial expectations and plans for navigating the COVID-19 impact on our employees, clients and stakeholders are forward-looking statements intended to qualify for the 'safe harbor' under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties relating to these statements include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties regarding COVID-19 and the effects of government and other measures seeking to contain its spread, risks related to an economic downturn or recession in India, the United States and other countries around the world, changes in political, business, and economic conditions, fluctuations in earnings, fluctuations in foreign exchange rates, our ability to manage growth, intense competition in IT services including those factors which may affect our cost advantage, wage increases in India and the US, our ability to attract and retain highly skilled professionals, time and cost overruns on fixed-price, fixed-time frame contracts, client concentration, restrictions on immigration, industry segment concentration, our ability to manage our international operations, reduced demand for technology in our key focus areas, disruptions in telecommunication networks or system failures, our ability to successfully complete and integrate potential acquisitions, liability for damages on our service contracts, the success of the companies in which Infosys has made strategic investments, withdrawal or expiration of governmental fiscal incentives, political instability and regional conflicts, legal restrictions on raising capital or acquiring companies outside India, unauthorized use of our intellectual property and general economic conditions affecting our industry and the outcome of pending litigation and government investigation. Additional risks that could affect our future operating results are more fully described in our United States Securities and Exchange Commission filings including our Annual Report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2022. These filings are available at www.sec.gov. Infosys may, from time to time, make additional written and oral forward-looking statements, including statements contained in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and our reports to shareholders. The Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements that may be made from time to time by or on behalf of the Company unless it is required by law.
mRNA-LNP Vaccine Development: Evaluation of Novel Ionizable Lipids
In this GEN webinar, our distinguished speaker Dr. Nicholas Valiante, will provide insights into designing, developing, and manufacturing mRNA vaccines…
The success of the mRNA-LNP COVID-19 vaccines have clinically proven the modality of lipid-based nanoparticle delivery, demonstrating the possibilities for rapid design, development, and manufacturing of other promising genomic medicines.
Due to their modular nature, LNP excipients can be mixed, matched, and modified during formulation to improve immune responses. Similarly, the encapsulated mRNA can be optimized to improve translation efficiency and stability.
In this GEN webinar, our distinguished speaker Dr. Nicholas Valiante, will provide insights into designing, developing, and manufacturing mRNA vaccines to maximize performance. Dr. Valiante will expand on the process to evaluate and select ionizable lipids required for mRNA-LNP vaccines development.
A live Q&A session will follow the presentation, offering you a chance to pose questions to our expert panelist.
Nicholas Valiante, PhD Chief Scientific Officer, President Innovac Therapeutics
What Has Driven the Labor Force Participation Gap since February 2020?
The U.S. labor force participation rate (LFPR) currently stands at 62.5 percent, 0.8 percentage point below its level in February 2020. This “participation…
Mary Amiti, Sebastian Heise, Giorgio Topa, and Julia Wu
The U.S. labor force participation rate (LFPR) currently stands at 62.5 percent, 0.8 percentage point below its level in February 2020. This “participation gap” translates into 2.1 million workers out of the labor force. In this post, we evaluate three potential drivers of the gap: First, population aging from the baby boomers reaching retirement age puts downward pressure on participation. Second, the share of individuals of retirement age that are actually retired has risen since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, long COVID and disability more generally may induce more people to leave the labor force. We find that nearly all of the participation gap can be explained by population aging, which caused a significant rise in the number of retirements. Higher retirement rates compared to pre-COVID have had only a modest effect, while disability has virtually no effect.
The LFPR is defined as the ratio between workers in the labor force (either employed or unemployed) and the civilian, non-institutional population age 16 and older. As the chart below shows, the LFPR has been gradually declining since the early 2000s. It stayed relatively flat over the period 2014-19 and even slightly rose up to February 2020 as the strong labor market exerted a positive effect on labor supply. After a dramatic decline in the early months of the pandemic, participation has recovered gradually but remains significantly below its pre-COVID level—by 0.8 percentage point or 2.1 million workers as of February 2023. We examine potential drivers of the participation gap using the Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly survey of about 60,000 households that is conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
The Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR) Remains below its Pre-Pandemic Level
Sources: Current Population Survey; Bureau of Labor Statistics. Notes: The chart shows the seasonally adjusted LFPR for the population aged 16+ years. The red dashed line illustrates the size of the shortfall between 2020:m2 and 2023:m2.
Population Aging
We first analyze population aging. As noted elsewhere, the panel chart below illustrates that as the baby boomer cohort has reached the retirement threshold, retirements have increased dramatically. The left panel shows the distribution of the U.S. population in 2009. Each gray bar shows the number of individuals of a given age in the U.S. population from U.S. Census data. The blue bars show the number of workers in that age group who are retired. We indicate the baby boomer cohort, that is, those workers born between 1946 and 1964, by the gray shaded area, and mark the retirement age of 65 years by the vertical red line. The left panel shows that in 2009 the baby boomers were just beginning to enter retirement.
Baby Boomer Retirements Have Increased Dramatically over Time
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau; Current Population Survey (CPS); authors’ calculations. Notes: The gray bars show the U.S. population of a given age. The blue bars show the estimated number of retirees at each age, computed from the share of retired workers at each age from the CPS. The red vertical line indicates the normal retirement age of 65 years. The gray shaded area indicates the ages corresponding to the baby boomer cohort, that is, those individuals born between 1946 and 1964.
The right panel of the chart shows the same distribution in 2022. By 2022, a large share of the baby boomer generation had entered retirement, leading to a significant increase in the number of individuals retired, as indicated by the blue bars.
Retirements within Specific Age Groups Have Increased Compared to Pre-Pandemic Levels
We next examine retirements within age groups in more detail. The previous chart suggests that retirement shares by age group have risen only modestly, as shown by the height of the blue bars relative to the gray bars. To substantiate this point, we break the population into groups of individuals aged 60-69, 70-79, and over 79. We focus on individuals aged 60 and older since these account for more than 90 percent of all retirees in the United States. For those aged 60-69, the retirement share has risen from an average of 39.7 percent in 2018-19 to 40.0 percent over the second half of 2022. The retirement share for those aged 70-79 has increased from 77.5 percent in 2018-19 to 78.8 percent in the more recent period. Finally, among those over 79, the retirement share has gone up from 88.5 percent to 90.5 percent. Here we consider the average over 2018-19 as our pre-pandemic reference point to remove shorter-term movements in the retirement shares.
How does this change in retirement behavior affect overall retirements? The share of retired workers in the U.S. population has risen substantially, from an average of 18 percent in 2018-19 to nearly 20 percent at the end of 2022. However, once we control for the overall aging of the population, the changes in the age-specific retirement shares reported above imply an increase in the overall share of retirees in the population of only about 0.3 percentage point.
Share of Workers with Disability and Not in the Labor Force Has Actually Fallen
We finally analyze the effect of disability on the participation gap. To capture a broad notion of disability, we focus on a set of six questions in the CPS that ask respondents whether because of a physical, mental, or emotional condition they have serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions.
We start by considering the number of disabled individuals in the labor force as a share of the total population. The share of workers with disability (based on the above definition) rose from an average of 2.5 percent of the population in 2018-19 to about 2.9 percent in the last six months of 2022. While the rise in disability among workers in the labor force may have implications for the intensity of work effort, a recent study has found relatively little change in average hours worked by workers with disability. Therefore, there may be relatively little effect on the LFPR since these workers are still in the labor force. For this reason, we focus on the share of disabled individuals not in the labor force. This share has risen slightly, from about 9.2 percent in 2018-19 to 9.4 percent in the second half of 2022. Once we adjust for aging, we find that the share of disabled individuals not in the labor force has, in fact, marginally declined. This result arises because disability shares have slightly fallen for the older age groups.
Impact on Labor Force Participation
How have the three channels affected labor force participation? We first analyze the impact of population aging in isolation by constructing a counterfactual LFPR that keeps constant the share of the population in each age group at February 2020 levels. The gold line in the chart below shows this age-adjusted participation rate. Removing the effect of aging can explain the entire participation gap, lifting LFPR by 0.9 percentage point in February 2023. This big effect arises because the large baby boomer cohort is right at the retirement cutoff. As the chart above shows, the retirement share rises dramatically with age around the age of 65. Consequently, the aging of the baby boomers between 2020 and 2022 led to a significant rise in retirements, reducing participation.
Second, we analyze the effect of excess retirements on participation, in addition to the effect of aging. To do so, we analyze how the overall age-adjusted retirement share would change if we went back to the retirement shares in each age group of 2018-19. In other words, we ask what LFPR would prevail if retirement behavior went back to pre-COVID levels, controlling for aging. Since about half of new retirees in 2020-22 were already out of the labor force prior to retirement (for example, a stay-at-home partner who transitions into retirement), we multiply the effect of excess retirement by one half. The red line in the chart below shows that additionally removing excess retirements increases LFPR by a further 0.2 percentage point in February 2023. This effect is smaller than in a recent study that finds a 0.6 percentage point effect. The difference arises mainly because we assume that only half of all excess retirees could return to the labor force, since the rest were already out of the labor force prior to retirement.
Finally, the increase in disability has virtually no effect on the participation gap because, as discussed above, the increase is entirely accounted for by individuals that remain in the labor force. We do not separately plot this effect on the chart below. Overall, our results imply that undoing the effects of population aging and excess retirements would raise the LFPR by 1.1 percentage point from 62.5 percent to 63.6 percent, more than making up for the participation gap.
Participation Rate Is Higher after Adjusting for Aging and Excess Retirements
Sources: Current Population Survey; authors’ calculations. Notes: The blue line shows the headline labor force participation rate (LFPR) reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The gold line is the counterfactual LFPR holding fixed the population age structure in February 2020. The red line further adds the surplus of retired workers in the recent period compared to 2018-19, at the fixed age structure of February 2020.
Conclusion
In this blog post we show that demographic trends, specifically population aging, exert a powerful influence on labor force participation. In other words, the participation gap largely disappears once we control for population aging, indicating that participation has recovered a great deal since the large shock induced by the pandemic. Other possible contributing factors, such as elevated retirement rates or disability, play only a minor role in explaining the participation gap. Population aging is likely to continue to exert strong downward pressure on participation going forward, as more of the baby boomer generation continue to enter retirement.
Mary Amiti is the head of Labor and Product Market Studies in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Research and Statistics Group.
Sebastian Heise is a research economist in Labor and Product Market Studies in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Research and Statistics Group.
Giorgio Topa is an economic research advisor in Labor and Product Market Studies in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Research and Statistics Group.
Julia Wu is a research analyst in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Research and Statistics Group.
How to cite this post:
Mary Amiti, Sebastian Heise, Giorgio Topa, and Julia Wu, “What Has Driven the Labor Force Participation Gap since February 2020?,” Federal Reserve Bank of New York Liberty Street Economics, March 30, 2023, https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2023/03/what-has-driven-the-labor-force-participation-gap-since-february-2020/.
Disclaimer The views expressed in this post are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the author(s).
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