Background:The goal of the current study was to investigate psychological resilience in the older adults (>64 years) compared with that of the young ones (<26 years).Methods: Questionnaire measures of depression, hopelessness, general health and resilience were administered to the participants. The resilience measure comprised three sub-scales of social support, emotional regulation and problem solving.Results: The older adults were the more resilient group especially with respect to emotional regulation ability and problem solving. The young ones had more resilience related to social support. Poor perceptions of general health and low energy levels predicted low levels of resilience regardless of age. Low hopelessness scores also predicted greater resilience in both groups. Experiencing higher levels of mental illness and physical dysfunction predicted high resilience scores especially for the social support resilience scale in the older adults. The negative effects of depression on resilience related to emotional regulation were countered by low hopelessness but only in the young adults.Conclusions: These results highlight the importance of maintaining resilience-related coping skills in both young and older adults but indicate that different psychological processes underlie resilience across the lifespan.

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Reflecting on 'human development' theorists face conceptual confusion, borne out experientially by contemporary ecological, social, and economic crises. Since concepts create realities (i.e. justify and motivate practices), and philosophers create concepts, it is important to consider how philosophers might respond to conceptual difficulties caused by the modern era's still influential 'binary' paradigm, exemplified by the law of the excluded middle, which entails a discursive split between modernism's ultimately predictable cosmos and postmodernism's insistence on fundamental chaos. Supposedly obliged to choose between opposites, theorists are caught between the necessity and iniquity of both. This impasse sets up conditions for what Lyotard calls 'differends,' and constrains our power to create responsible concepts.To show that Morin's 'generalised complexity' takes us beyond the modernist/postmodernist impasse, I take up his injunction to promote 'an epistemological reversal,' starting from the notion of 'open system' and moving through 'emergence' and 'organization' to 'logical complexity.' Our epistemological task accordingly is to establish strategies for interpreting multiple dimensions of phenomenal reality, given the irreducibly complex relation of co-implication between mutually negating opposites. I agree with Cilliers that deconstruction is exemplary in this respect, but aim to broaden the adventure by suggesting ideas for a 'pragmatics of complexity' involving vocabulary, concepts, strategies, metaphors, and heuristics derived also from other philosophers and psychoanalytic theorists.

The philosophical presupposition underlying this article is that theoretical "models" for self-understanding will only succeed if subjectivity is approached as a complex phenomenon defined in terms of necessary internal conflict. Lacan's articulation of three subjective registers (Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic) as a "Borromean knot" offers the basis for developing a model for self-understanding that does justice to this kind of complexity in human subjectivity. One may add to this that specific concerns and passions characterize each register. The ontologicallexistential concern of the Real engenders "ontophilia," the self-concern of the Imaginary "autophilia", and the concern for humanity in the Symbolic "anthrophilia". This articulation of registers and passions is further complexified by internal divisions between "paranoiac", "hysterical", and "paradoxical" styles of the passions. I aim to outline an adequately complex Lacanian model for self-understanding as an articulation of registers, passions, and styles. In an effort to make this accessible beyond the confines of Lacanian scholarship, it has been applied to well-known historical and contemporary figures.

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