Resilience, Loneliness, and Impulsivity among Adolescents: A Systematic Review of the Literature

Abstract

Purpose: Individuals going through adolescence faced a significant number of changes from biological, and cognitive to social and emotional. Due to the changes experienced by adolescents, it is susceptible for adolescents to experience a high level of loneliness. The correlation between loneliness and impulsivity and the association between impulsivity and self-harm as well as self-injurious behaviors puts adolescents in a vulnerable position in performing undesirable acts or behaviors. On the other hand, resilience plays a significant role in an individual’s ability to cope with an adverse situation or bounce back quickly after the undesired situation in order to maintain or regain mental health. Therefore, the objective of this study is to run review research through contemporary studies to summarize accumulative documents in the area of resilience, loneliness, and impulsivity among adolescents to investigate the mediating role of resilience. Methodology: For this, a search was carried out on the Web of Science, Google Scholar, and PubMed. Thus, a set of keywords was used, followed by filtering main keywords, resulting in a review of 99 articles published a decade ago. Findings: The results demonstrated that the number of adolescents having mental illness increased significantly over the years, and adolescents aged 16 and above are at risk of mental disorders. Besides that, this research revealed that adolescents in Malaysia are at risk of peer and social rejection, which is highly associated with loneliness and also has a correlation with aggression and impulsivity. Conclusion: It was seen that loneliness and impulsivity are essential risk factors for adolescents’ mental health and resilience can consider effective cognitive and coping skills for adolescents. It was also perceived that most of the papers focus on the investigation of the correlation between loneliness, impulsivity, and resilience, being necessary to develop more experimental studies on the effectiveness of resilience therapy for adolescents’ enrichment. These results serve as a source of reference for future research.