This implies that life experience is always a solely function of age; however, I know that life experience is not always such as the amount of life experience I have is greater in relation to many whose age is larger than mine. I deduce that I can say this due to the image's other implication that one's ability to cope is the ratio of life experience to negative experiences lived.

So, with my 22 years, I have experienced:

1. death of both grandfathers at age 3.
2. emotional neglect for lifespan.
3. physical abuse by mother starting at age 12.
4. physical abuse by father starting at age 14.
5. family dipping below poverty level (unable to provide food for the month, going without food for prolonged periods of time) from ages 14-16.
6. manipulation by mother to perceive entirety of family as being negative figures in my life attempting to hurt my mother who presented herself as an saint-like figure starting at age 12.
7. death of father unexpectedly at age 15.
8. personal funds left to self by father stolen by mother from ages 16-21.
9. death of long-term boyfriend to leukemia at age 20.
10. emotional abuse by boyfriend for 4 months at age 21.

Now, I'm picturing a graph. That graph has emotional_wellbeing as it's y-axis, age as the x-axis, inflection points would be negative events (possibly positive as well as i'm sure they also affect one's ability to cope), and the slope would represent positive/negative/no change in emotion.

I would say that inflection points in the graph would be the negative events; the slope surrounding these inflection points would be the reaction to these events. This would imply that full recovery from these events (acknowledgement of them...however you define "recovery) would also be inflection points.

I will use myself as an example.

I would say a more-or-less straight line (as I have no data to pin-point small ups and downs as i'm sure the changes are near-negligible) until age of 3 when I lost my grandparents, my dog whom I loved, and had my third birthday all in one week. The change in concavity of my graph toward a negative slope would occur (possibly several changes after each event). I remained sad for a couple weeks (again several small changes in slope due to small events like getting ice cream...etc), returned to normal.

Emotional neglect for lifespan (by parents) resulted in my baseline being different than most as I began to develop dissociation disorder causing me to become "numb" during life's trying moments; my recovery was faster because, unless called upon, the event lay largely in the back of my mind. This becomes important in measuring recoery time later. Now, to continue:

Physical abuse by mother would result, obviously, in a rapid, negative change in concavity; my dissociation would kick in, and all would be forgotten in a few hours. Father's physical abuse was forgotten in weeks. Poverty level where hunger and emptiness at not being able to do things other kids do (outings, meals at school-my mother hid this from the school as she was embarrassed to say we were poor) lead to less of a change in slope as my dissociation kept me from thinking about it.

I won't go into details about the rest, I think you all get the point here.

Now, I will propose why my method of using a line-graph would be best suited for determining maturity (which I will define below) than the OP's graph.

This is where I disagree with the ability to define one's ability as proportional to life experiences. I don't think they can be graphed this way. I would propose graphing in this sort of way and measuring one's recovery time from these sorts of events as well as the time at which they remain stagnated emotionally from these events. That, I believe, would be a true test of one's ability to cope with difficult situations.

So, I now would say that age does not imply life experience; there are many adults who have more "age" than myself but whose life experience is less (there are fewer events that would cause an inflection in their emotional wellbeing as compared to mine). I would say that the more events one experiences would be a greater indicator of one's ability to recover. If anything, one could argue that the probability of having more events would increase as age increases.

Now, if you were to say that life experience is also the negative events that occur; this could change things entirely. I think it's hard to separate the two, personally. So, I called life experience the rate of change of slope between inflection points and the negative events the inflection points. I would expect greater maturity (if you are assuming that maturity is defined by those who take less time to recover from negative events, i.e. quicker return to "baseline") to be within those whose change in rate of emotional state decreases over time when measured after negative events.

If anyone else has an alternative method, I would be greatly interested in hearing about it. As any scientist would say, there are always better methods. This feels like it was incoherent and probably a waste of time.

Edit: Began thinking some more as if there would be some way to define a function, but obviously that woul dbe impossible as it is clearly a stochastic process (non-deterministic, sporadically-changing function).

The bad spot is also smaller on the right one, so that kind of fucks this up...