Are there any studies regarding elderly people and learning resiliance? On Parenting, issues regarding emotional resilience are often discussed as something of great value, a lifelong gift to give to one's child, and I cite studies and articles to help parents learn what resilience is and how to teach it. I define resiliency as a kind of positive mind set which allows a child/person to maintain a healthier outlook in the face of stress. For example, resilient kids see setbacks as learning opportunities rather than failures, feel that they have agency instead of helplessness, avoid negative self-talk, etc.

It seems to me (totally uninformed opinion coming) that much older people are less likely to be able to change their psychological habits/traits. (It's a cognitive bias I have.)

I know from my own dogs that it's quite possible to teach an old dog new tricks (my 13 year old Border Collie could learn new tricks in a few minutes), but so far, I've not been able to find anyone willing to fund a grant involving clicker training patients my age to learn new ways to cope with unwanted emotions or negative experiences. (J/k about the grant. And the clicker training/operant conditioning, but with clicker training, there is no negative feedback except for lack of reward.)

If someone can point me in the right direction to literature demonstrating how to successfully increase resiliency in elderly patients, it would be much appreciated.
This isn't quite my area of expertise, but I did find a couple recent papers that attempted to use behavioral interventions to improve some measure of resilience in older populations and showed positive results:

Luskin, F., Reitz, M., Newell, K., Quinn, T. G., &amp; Haskell, W. (2002). A controlled pilot study of stress management training of elderly patients with congestive heart failure. Preventive cardiology, 5(4), 168-174.

Perez-Blasco, J., Sales, A., Meléndez, J. C., &amp; Mayordomo, T. (2016). The effects of mindfulness and self-compassion on improving the capacity to adapt to stress situations in elderly people living in the community. Clinical Gerontologist, 39(2), 90-103.

In addition to one showing an effect of a physical intervention, which makes sense since physical and mental/emotional outcomes tend to be highly correlated:

Roh, S. Y. (2016). Effect of a 16-week Pilates exercise program on the ego resiliency and depression in elderly women. Journal of exercise rehabilitation, 12(5), 494.



In summary, it seems like it's possible to improve psychological habits in older adults, though I didn't find anything comparing older to younger populations, and the vast amount of literature in this area seems to be focused on measuring and correlating measures of resiliency with other health outcomes, rather than improving it directly. Seems like an important area for future work.