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In the field of mental health, resilience is understood as a psychological characteristic intimately entwined with the experience of disequilibrium. Originally, the resilience literature focused on children. But psychological development can continue beyond childhood. Recently, psychologists have begun to examine the resilience that arises—or does not—through the vicissitudes of adult life as well. Psychologically, a human being can be considered a complex system of drives, conflicts, capacities, hopes and so on. The human life span can be conceptualized as repeated experiences of stability and disequilibrium for a person's psychological system. From that stability and disequilibrium come the emergence of new abilities and worldviews. One possible outcome of the experience of repeated psychological disequilibrium inherent to adult life is the development of psychological resilience. This paper examines the affective experience of psychological development through adult life and what it means to be actively receptive to development in a way that optimizes the growth of resilience throughout adulthood. This article aims to make several contributions to the systems sciences. First, it brings psychology back into conversation with the systems community after an absence, in the International Society for the Systems Sciences at least, of many years. Second, systems theorists have paid little attention to the affective experience of disequilibrium—a recognized systems process—in a human system like an adult person. Third, to the mental health community, this paper seeks to communicate that perhaps much of the suffering and negative affect people experience through adulthood can be reframed from psychopathology to developmental transition—to disequilibrium—and the vulnerability and challenges that go with it. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Using data from the first wave of data collection in the Betula project, this research examined semantic memory performance in adulthood and old age (N = 1000). The Betula project is a 10-year longitudinal study on memory and health that involves participants from 10 age groups: 35, 40, 45, …, and 80 years of age. Results from tests of verbal fluency and vocabulary indicated no performance variation between 35 and 50 years of age, followed by a gradual deterioration with increasing age. In a test of general knowledge, only the two oldest cohorts showed deficits. When educational level was statistically controlled, a different pattern of results was seen: the middle-aged adults performed at the highest level and, with the exception of one fluency test, no age-related deficits were observed before 75 years of age. These results suggest that, although there may be age-related deficits in semantic memory in the general population, education appears to be a more important factor than adult age per se for semantic memory functioning. The data support the view that activation of preexisting memory representations is relatively unaffected by the adult aging process, and demonstrate the pivotal role of cultural factors (e.g., education, verbal experience) in proficient semantic memory functioning.