Late-Life Decline in Well-Being Across Adulthood in Germany, the UK, and the US: Something is Seriously Wrong at the End of Life
27 Pages Posted: 13 Apr 2010
Date Written: April 2010
Abstract
Throughout adulthood and old age, levels of well-being appear to remain relatively stable. However, evidence is emerging that late in life well-being declines considerably. Using long-term longitudinal data of deceased participants in national samples from Germany, the UK, and the US, we examine how long this period lasts. In all three nations and across the adult age range, well-being was relatively stable over age, but declined rapidly with impending death. Articulating notions of terminal decline associated with impending death, we identified prototypical transition points in each study between three and five years prior to death, after which normative rates of decline steepened by a factor of three or more. The findings suggest that mortality-related mechanisms drive late-life changes in well-being and highlight the need for further refinement of psychological concepts about how and when late-life declines in psychosocial functioning prototypically begin.
Keywords: Selective mortality, successful aging, differential aging, psychosocial factors, well-being, multiphase growth model
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
By Ed Diener
-
What Can Economists Learn from Happiness Research?
By Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer
-
Culture and Subjective Well-Being
By William Tov and Ed Diener
-
A Note on Unhappiness and Unemployment Duration
By Andrew Clark
-
Happiness, Economy and Institutions
By Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer
-
Subjective Well-Being: Three Decades of Progress
By Ed Diener, Eunkook Suh, ...
-
Inequality and Happiness: Are Europeans and Americans Different?
By Alberto F. Alesina, Rafael Di Tella, ...