Age distribution and psychological characteristics in the United States

Age-associated Well-Being Remains a Mystery

Age and Happiness

Global and hedonic well-being may represent a potentially valuable social indicator, but little is understood about the underlying causal factors. The best predictor of well-being that has been identified so far is age, in that self-reported well-being begins to improve during mid adulthood. In an attempt to discover the underlying factors controlling well-being the data from a large survey were stratified by age and then analyzed for possible confounding factors. The strong association between age and well-being was confirmed with a high degree of confidence, but failed to detect any evidence of a causal association between gender, relationship status, raising children, or employment status. Although maturity-related traits, such as increased wisdom and affect regulation, have been proposed in the past to explain the age-associated increase in well-being, the sharp slope deflection points and the U-shape of the curve are inconsistent with these explanations.

Age-Associated Well-Being Remains a Mystery

Introduction

Global and psychological (hedonic) well-being has been suggested to be a way for quantifying the overall psychological health of a nation (reviewed in Stone, Schwartz, Broderick, and Angus, 2010). Global well-being represents an individual's overall assessment of their lives, while hedonic well-being is used to measure a person's average mood (affect) or attitude concerning their current life (affect).

Previous studies have found that once a person is transitioning through middle age their global assessment improves (reviewed in Stone, Schwartz, Broderick, and Angus, 2010). This improvement is unrelated to generational differences in terms of experience and not limited to Western culture. Studies examining affect means for populations also revealed less frequent negative moods with age, but the intensity for either negative or positive moods, or the frequency of positive moods, were uncorrelated with age. To better understand the relationship between age and well-being, Stone and colleagues (2010) analyzed the data from a large phone survey that interrogated study subjects about their global and hedonic well-being.

Results

The Gallup Organization telephone survey was conducted in 2008 and of the respondents, 340,847 met the inclusion criteria for the current study (Stone, Schwartz, Broderick, and Angus, 2010). The age range was 18 to 85, with an average age of 47.3 years, and males constituted 48% of the respondents. The hedonic well-being items included enjoyment, happiness, stress, worry, sadness, and anger, while the global well-being was assessed by the ladder method, where the top of a 10-step ladder represents the best life imaginable.

Global well-being was found to decrease rapidly as people entered young adulthood and then more slowly up to the age of 53 (Stone, Schwartz, Broderick, and Angus, 2010). After the age of 53, global self-assessment gradually returned to the same levels reported for late adolescence by age 85. Correcting for the covariates of gender, living with a partner, raising children, or being unemployed did not change the overall pattern or values significantly.

The positive affect items, enjoyment and happiness, had roughly the same pattern, but the range across age groups was much smaller. Late adolescents were happy and enjoying life about 90% of the time, but decreased to almost 80% for early and middle adult years before returning to near 90%. The age-associated changes in negative emotions did not follow this pattern. Stress dropped throughout adulthood from a high of about 50% at 22 years of age to below 20% by age 85. Worry remained between 30% and 40% until middle age, and then dropped to a low of 20% by 85. Age-associated anger had an almost linear pattern, starting at 20% in late adolescence and dropping to below 10% by age 85. Sadness remained almost constant throughout adulthood, at, or just below, 20%, with a small peak during the early 50s. For all hedonic items, correcting for covariates had little or no effect on the overall patterns.

When the data was stratified by gender, women were found to be generally more stressed, sad, and worried than men, although the F. values were small enough that these associations were considered weak. The difference between men and women for global well-being and the other hedonic items were even smaller, so well-being was generally the same for men and women.

Discussion

The first half of adulthood, based on these findings, are more stressful, worrisome, and angry, and less fulfilling, enjoyable, and happy for Americans. However, after the mid-50s things begin to improve gradually for the second half of life. It should be noted that the range of deviation from the mean is relatively small for all measures except stress and should be considered in light of the large population size that conferred enough statistical power to the analysis that even small differences achieved significance.

Despite the power inherent in this analysis, the authors were unable to find any evidence explaining the U-shaped global well-being pattern. The covariates gender, living with partner, with children, or unemployed, did not have a significant effect on any of the patterns. Previously proposed theories for explaining age-associated changes in well-being, including increasing wisdom and affect regulation, do not explain the sharp changes in slope at 22 to 25 and 50 to 53 years of age, or the U-shaped pattern. The authors concluded that the potential value of well-being measures as a social indicator is sufficient to warrant further research into potential causal factors.