Bravery
The Bravery stat is a measure how brave the soldier is in the face of danger. A higher bravery level results in higher morale on a mission, and therefore, less likelihood of panicking or going berserk during combat.
Starting Values
New recruits will always begin with a value between 10 and 60.
Maximum Caps
An X-COM soldier's bravery is capped at 100. (But aliens can have a Bravery of 110.)
Improvement
You have a chance of +10 Bravery being awarded if your soldier loses control due to heavy morale loss. If your Bravery is improving, it can be due to several reasons. On the one hand, it could mean you're not doing very well and you're losing so many soldiers that the others are panicking. Getting hurt also drops morale. Or it could mean that the soldier isn't good at resisting psi attacks.
More specifically, each time your soldier is panicked or mind controlled, his or her chance of a Bravery increase at the end of the combat mission increases by about 10%. At 10 panics and/or MCs, you have approx. a 90% chance, and at 11 mental breakdowns, the +10 Bravery increase is guaranteed. You can not get more than the lone +10 award in any one mission, even if you panic a hundred times.
Also note that due to the way Bravery is stored in the data files, it can only have/increase in increments of 10.
See Also
Extra Edit: if a soldiers's morale drops below 50 and they don't panic coz of it, they will get +10 increase back at base
User:60.241.75.186 - Erm - But their panic experience counter won't be going up if they don't panic... Does it have some hidden check which, if they pass, their panic counter UNITREF.DAT[085] increases? (You're sure you've seen this? My guys hardly ever get wounded these days, so they're almost never at low morale... so I wouldn't know about this.) - MikeTheRed User replies: pretty sure of it. i noiced that soldiers were rewarded for not panic-ing. A sort of brave "i'm tough" reward. (good to see activity with such an old game BTW, plz edit freely to fit the theme of this whole site)