Ego and Spiritual Transcendence: Relevance to Psychological Resilience and the Role of Age

Abstract

The paper investigates different approaches of transcendence in the sense of spiritual experience as predictors for general psychological resilience. This issue is based on the theoretical assumption that resilience does play a role for physical health. Furthermore, there is a lack of empirical evidence about the extent to which spirituality does play a role for resilience. As potential predictors for resilience, ego transcendence, spiritual transcendence, and meaning in life were measured in a sample of 265 people. The main result of a multiple regression analysis is that, in the subsample with people below 29 years, only one rather secular scale that is associated with ego transcendence predicts resilience, whereas for the older subsample of 29 years and above, spiritual transcendence gains both a positive (oneness and timelessness) and a negative (spiritual insight) relevance to psychological resilience. On the one hand, these results concur with previous studies that also found age-related differences. On the other hand, it is surprising that the MOS spiritual insight predicts psychological resilience negatively, the effect is increasing with age. One possible explanation concerns wisdom research. Here, an adaptive way of dealing with the age-related loss of control is assumed to be relevant to successful aging.

Resilience moderates the association between chronic pain and depressive symptoms in the elderly

“…Accordingly, psychological resilience has been shown to protect against the adverse effects of chronic pain on psychological adjustment (Ruiz‐Párraga et al., ). However, due to unique life circumstances and associated life challenges in advanced age (such as bereavement, loss of social roles and illness; Hildon et al., ), resilience may operate differently in older, compared with younger adults (Duggleby et al., ; Hanfstingl, ).…”

Cross-Lagged Analyses Between Life Meaning, Self-Compassion, and Subjective Well-being Among Gifted Adults

“…Affected individuals judge their lives as frustratingly empty and pointless (Schnell 2009). They often experience anxiety, depression, pessimism, and negative affect; they report low degrees of positive affect, resilience, self-efficacy, and life satisfaction (Damásio and Koller 2015;Hanfstingl 2013;Schnell et al 2018). While a meaningful life is an indicator for eudaimonic well-being, positive mood and life satisfaction are seen as indicators for hedonistic well-being -also known as subjective well-being (Steger et al 2008).…”

The Relationship between Spirituality, Quality of Life, and Resilience

“…Quantitative research journals with statistical analysis in their hypotheses testing published between 2013 and 2018 were chosen. The strength of the relationship value between the two variables is classified into five levels based on [11]…”