A Generative, Homeostatic Account of Psychological Experience: Reinterpreting Resilience, Distress, and Recovery Across the Lifespan.

Research across developmental and lifespan psychology has identified a recurring pattern in psychological well-being: relatively high emotional flexibility in early childhood, increased vulnerability to distress across adolescence and midlife, and partial improvement in later adulthood. Prevailing explanations typically attribute these shifts to the acquisition, calibration, and eventual decline of regulatory capacities and psychosocial resources. This paper proposes an alternative, integrative account grounded in a generative, homeostatic framework of psychological experience. Within this perspective, experience is understood as continuously constructed through ongoing interpretive activity and rendered subjectively real through conscious awareness, while an intrinsic regulatory capacity supports adaptive reorganization. Psychological health is conceptualized as reflecting the system's baseline flexibility, whereas distress corresponds to the stabilization of self-referential interpretive patterns that narrow experiential and behavioral possibilities. Drawing on research from developmental, affective, and systems-oriented psychology, the paper reinterprets lifespan trends as emergent properties of changing constraints on experiential organization rather than as cumulative gains or losses in psychological assets. This framework offers a unifying account of resilience, vulnerability, and recovery, and suggests new directions for research and intervention focused on the conditions that support adaptive reorganization across the lifespan.