Social resource correlates of levels and time-to-death-related changes in late-life affect.

Abstract

Little is known regarding how well psychosocial resources that promote well-being continue to correlate with affect into very late life. We examined social resource correlates of levels and time-to-death related changes in affect balance (an index of affective positivity) over 19 years among 1,297 by now deceased participants (aged 69 to 103 at first assessment, M = 80 years; 36% women) from the Australian Longitudinal Study of Aging. A steeper decline in affect balance was evident over a time-to-death metric compared with chronological age. Separating time-varying social resource predictors into between- and within-person components revealed several associations with level of affect balance, controlling for age at death, gender, functional disability and global cognition. Between-person associations revealed that individuals who were more satisfied with family, and more socially active, expressed greater positivity compared with those who were less satisfied, and less socially active. Within-person associations indicated that participants reported higher positivity on occasions when they were more socially active. In addition, lower affect balance was associated with more frequent contact with children. Our results suggest that social engagement and satisfying relationships confer benefits for affective well-being that are retained into late life. However our findings do not provide evidence to indicate that social resources protect against terminal decline in well-being.

How far reaches the power of personality? Personality predictors of terminal decline in well-being.

“…Converging with prior evidence, we found that people who died at younger ages, were less socially active, and suffered from disability or a compromised ability to carry out Instrumental Activities of Daily Living reported lower levels of well-being close to death (see Brandmaier et al, 2017;Windsor et al, 2014). Moving beyond previous reports and demonstrating the power of personality to predict important life outcomes across the entire life span, our results further revealed that personality traits predict late-life well-being above and beyond these well-established predictors.…”

Psychological vulnerability to daily stressors in old age

“…This suggested that older people might do better in avoiding negative affective arousal in their everyday life (note, however, that age-related decline of NA was not consistently confirmed in all studies [24,32]). In contrast, recent evidence on terminal decline in affective well-being points to the limits of self-regulatory processes in the late phase of life [17,36,48,50]. Altogether, changes of affective well-being in old age lead to the question whether affective reactivity to daily stressors changes in a systematic age-related way across the adult life span.…”

Terminal decline in well-being: The role of social orientation.

“…Though not independent of one another, the convergence of findings across approaches adds to the credibility of our results about the importance of social resources for late-life well-being. We also consider it important to keep the single-phase model because it helps connecting the current study to the large majority of earlier reports on late-life well-being that were based on relatively few data points and thus did not allow apply multi-phase models (Berg, Hassing, Thorvadsson, & Johansson, 2011; Carmel, Shrira, & Shmotkin, 2013; Diehr, Williamson, Burke, & Psaty, 2002; Mroczek & Spiro, 2005; Palgi, Shrira, Ben-Ezra, Spalter, Shmotkin, & Kavé, 2010; Palgi, Shrira, Ben-Ezra, Spalter, Kavé, & Shmotkin, 2014; Schilling et al, 2013; Vogel, Schilling, Wahl, Beekman, & Penninx, 2012; Windsor, Gerstorf, & Luszcz, 2015). …”