Resilience is conceptualized as a dynamic developmental process encompassing the attainment of positive adaptation despite the exposure to or the experience of significant threat, severe adversity, or trauma that typically constitute major assaults on the processes underlying biological and psychological development (Luthar, Cicchetti & Becker, 2000; Masten & Cicchetti, 2016). The notion of an average expectable environment for promoting normal development connotes that there is a species-specific range of environmental conditions that elicit normal development in humans. Concerns about how childhood adversity impacts developmental processes and mechanisms have captured deep concerns in researchers in the fields of developmental and clinical psychology, developmental psychopathology, evolutionary psychology, molecular genetics, and neuroscience. Child maltreatment exemplifies a pathogenic relational environment that is far beyond the range of what is normally encountered and engenders substantial risk for maladaptation across domains of biological and psychological development. Child maltreatment is implicated in the disruption of multiple biological systems, including neuroendocrine and immunological functioning, neurobiology, and physical and mental health outcomes. Nonetheless, even though there is strong scientific evidence for maladaptation associated with maltreatment, the absence of an average expectable environment does not condemn maltreated children to negative developmental outcomes later in life. Resilience is possible across the life course.

This chapter chronicles the professional trajectory of Dante Cicchetti from his undergraduate years as a psychology major at the University of Pittsburgh through obtaining his PhD in Clinical and Developmental Psychology at the University of Minnesota. It describes his longitudinal research on the organization of development in infants and children with Down Syndrome. Subsequently, while an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard, his first academic job, he began groundbreaking longitudinal research on the etiology, intergenerational transmission, and developmental sequelae of child maltreatment. He also initiated theoretical work on the discipline of developmental psychopathology. At the Mt. Hope Family Center in the Department of Psychology at the University of Rochester, genetic, epigenetic, and biological research were implemented and linked to psychosocial and resilient functioning of child maltreatment and the offspring of depressed mothers. Evidence-based preventive interventions were conducted and shown to improve the functioning of maltreated youngsters and young offspring of depressed caregivers.