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Competence, Resilience, and Development 33In the following discussion of competence, resilience, and psychopathology,this chapter highlights ideas and findings pertinent to prevention and adolescence.The first section is focused on competence and the developmental tasks of adolescence.The next section describes the kind of theory and evidence linking competenceand symptoms of psychopathology in adolescence. The third section drawson findings from studies of risk and resilience to identify clues about what mattersfor adolescents at risk and the implications of these clues for resiliencefocusedtheory and intervention. The concluding section highlights the transitionsinto and out of adolescence as windows of opportunity for prevention and strategicintervention, with some hints at future directions integrating the study of brainand behavioral development.Competence and Adolescent DevelopmentThe concepts of competence, psychopathology, and resilience, though distinct,all involve judgments about how well a person is doing in life. Competence is apopular concept in many fields, as well as in conversational language, but in developmentalscience, it has been defined as follows:Competence refers to a family of constructs related to the capacity or motivation for,process of, or outcomes of effective adaptation in the environment, often inferredfrom a track record of effectiveness in age-salient developmental tasks and alwaysembedded in developmental, cultural, and historical context. (Masten, Burt, &Coatsworth, 2006)Competence develops and has a normative course, as well as multiple dimensionsand individual differences. Normatively in the human population, competencewould be expected to improve over the course of adolescence, as young peoplemature and learn, despite increases in specific problems and detours along the roadsto adulthood. During the second decade of life, there are major gains across multipledomains of adaptation in basic capabilities and coordinated execution ofactions, over the short and long term. There are also huge variations in the timing,pace, and nature of these changes, and in the attendant competence of adolescentsas they move through these years (Steinberg et al., 2006).Competence is multidimensional, and across domains of competence, individualsmay be advanced in one key domain (e.g., doing well in academic subjects atschool) and less advanced in another (e.g., making friends with peers). Individualcompetence, even in the same domain, may falter, then recover, or get off trackfor long periods of time. In other words, there is continuity and change or synchronizeddevelopment and uneven development, across the broad areas encompassedby the concept of competence.