Although the term has been around for a very long time, being resilient in a psychological sense did not start to come into common usage until the 1970s. Aaron Antonovsky was a sociologist and academic who started to apply the term in the way it is often used today in his 1979 publication, Health, Stress and Coping. An American developmental psychologist, Emmy Werner, best-known for a four-decade-long longitudinal study of children, was one of the first researchers to use the term academically. She noted how children in low-income families would often grow up with various social problems that they would replicate in their adult lives. However, her studies also found that about one-third of such children would avoid going down these negative social and behavioural routes, something she attributed to their resilience.
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