Aging News Information
Happiness Increases with Age for All Generations
But your overall level of well-being depends on when
you were born
Feb. 11, 2013 - Psychological well-being has been
linked to many important life outcomes, including career success,
relationship satisfaction, and even health. But its not clear how
feelings of well-being change as we age, as different studies have
provided evidence for various trends over time.
A new report published in
Psychological
Science, a journal of the
Association for
Psychological Science, reveals that self-reported feelings of
well-being tend to increase with age, but that a persons overall level
of well-being depends on when he or she was born.
Psychological scientist Angelina R. Sutin of
Florida State University College of Medicine conducted the study while
at the National Institute on Aging (NIA) at the National Institutes of
Health (NIH), where she remains a guest researcher.
She and colleagues at NIA predicted that people in
the same birth cohort - born around the same time - may have had
unique experiences that shape the way they evaluate happiness and
optimism. They hypothesized that the level of well-being a person
reports would, therefore, vary according to his or her birth year.
Using two large-scale longitudinal studies, NIHs
Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA) and the CDCs National
Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), Sutin and colleagues
looked at data from several thousand people over 30 years, including
over 10,000 reports on well-being, health, and other factors.
When the researchers analyzed the data across the
whole pool of participants, older adults had lower levels of well-being
than younger and middle-aged adults.
But when Sutin and her colleagues analyzed the same
data while taking birth cohort into account, a different trend appeared:
Life satisfaction increased over the participants lifetimes. This trend
remained even after factors like health, medication, sex, ethnicity, and
education were taken into account.
So what explains the different results?
While life satisfaction increased with age for each
cohort, older birth cohorts - especially people born between 1885 and
1925 - started off with lower levels of well-being in comparison to
people born more recently. Looking at life satisfaction across all of
the participants, regardless of when they were born, obscures the fact
that each cohort actually shows the same underlying trend.
Sutin and colleagues point out that the level of
well-being of cohorts born in the early part of the 20th century,
particularly those who lived through the Great Depression, was
substantially lower than the level of well-being of cohorts who grew up
during more prosperous times.
The greater well-being of more recent cohorts could
be the result of economic prosperity, increased educational
opportunities, and the expansion of social and public programs over the
latter half of the 20th century.
According to the researchers, these findings may
have important implications for todays younger generations.
As young adults today enter a stagnant workforce,
the challenges of high unemployment may have implications for their
well-being that long outlast the period of joblessness. Economic turmoil
may impede psychological, as well as financial, growth even decades
after times get better.
Co-authors on this research include Antonio
Terracciano also of Florida State University College of Medicine and a
guest researcher at the NIA; Yuri Milaneschi of the National Institute
on Aging and VU University Medical Center; and Yang An, Luigi Ferrucci
and Alan B. Zonderman of the National Institute on Aging, NIH.
This research was supported in part by the
Intramural Research Program of the National Institute on Aging, National
Institutes of Health.
The APS journal
Psychological
Science reports it is the highest ranked empirical
journal in psychology.
Click to More Senior News on the
Front Page
Open all references in tabs: [1 - 5]