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Happiness Comes With Age, Study Reveals

2010-05-18 04:29:36

Rachael Rettner

livescience.com Mon May 17, 3:15 pm ET

Life looks a little rosier after 50, a new study finds. Older people in their

mid- to late-50s are generally happier, and experience less stress and worry

than young adults in their 20s, the researchers say.

The results, based on a Gallup phone survey from 2008 of more than 340,000

Americans, held even after the researchers accounted for factors that could

have contributed to differences in well-being with age, such as whether the

participants were married, had children at home or were employed.

So if having a partner and getting rid of the kids aren't responsible for the

uptick in happiness and general life satisfaction with age, then what is? More

studies will be needed to find out, the researchers say.

"That can be based on social things, on societal things, on biological things;

and for us that is the big question," study researcher Arthur Stone, a

psychologist at Stony Brook University in N.Y.

Two ways to look at life

The findings agree with previous work showing well-being varies with age. And

some studies have narrowed things down to suggest that happiness comes with

being old, male and Republican.

However, the current work included measures of both overall happiness (called

global well-being) and day-to-day experiences of specific feelings such as

stress and happiness (called hedonic well-being).

These two measures of well-being are rarely included in the same study, Stone

said. But they are both important, since global well-being provides a more

reflective look at life while hedonic well-being gives a more immediate view,

he said.

The immediate, hedonic measures - happiness, enjoyment, stress, worry, anger

and sadness - all changed with age, but they showed very different patterns.

For example, stress and anger steadily decreased from young adulthood through

old age. But worry was fairly constant until age 50, when it declined. Sadness

levels rose slightly in the early 40s and declined in the mid 50s, but overall

sadness didn't change much with age.

And people's overall satisfaction with their lives showed a U-shaped pattern,

dipping down until about the age of 50 before trending upward again.

Men and women showed very similar patterns in terms of how well-being changed

with age, though women tended to have higher levels of stress, worry and

sadness. However, women had about the same levels of happiness as men and

tended to feel better overall about their lives, especially during the first 50

years.

The results emphasize the importance of looking at hedonic well-being since

these feelings, particularly the negative ones, don't all vary the same way as

we age, Stone said.

"Looking at well-being really needs to be multidimensional and more

comprehensive than might be suggested by the current literature," he said.

Why are older people happier?

There are several theories that might explain why people feel better with age

that don't have to do with lifestyle factors. It could be, for example, that

older people are better at controlling their emotions than younger people. Or

it might have something to do with nostalgia, the idea that older people

remember fewer negative memories and so are happier.

Also, older people might focus less on what they have or have not achieved, and

more on how to get the most out of the rest of their lives, Stone said.

The results will be published this week in the journal Proceedings of the

National Academy of Sciences.