Abstract
Resilience is a mental capacity of people to cope with harmful events such as abuse, disaster, and so forth. So far, resilience has been investigated by mainly using self-report questionnaires and hence, the explanation by past findings is limited to the explicit aspect of resilience. The present study aimed at investigating the relationship between implicit and explicit aspects of resilience. As an explicit measure, we used self-report questionnaire consisted of four types of resilience scales that can assess understanding/utilization of the own personal/environmental resources. Meanwhile, as an implicit measure, we employed an implicit association test that disclosed an automatic evaluation for the availability of closely related people for each observer: it was hypothesized that the availability for closely related people would be positively related with one of explicit aspects of resilience (i.e. utilization of the environmental resources of resilience). Fourteen adults took part in the experiment which consisted of both the implicit and explicit tests. As a result, there was a significant correlation between the scale scores and implicit association scores for the utilization of the environmental resources. The results suggest that at least a part of the resilience mechanism is implicit.
