Life satisfaction across adulthood: different determinants at different ages?

Abstract

It is likely that with aging and changing life circumstances, individuals’ values shift in systematic ways, and that these shifts may be accompanied by shifts in the determinants of their subjective judgments of well being. To examine this possibility, the relations among the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) and a number of personality, affect, demographic, and cognitive variables were examined in a sample of 818 participants between the ages of 18 and 94. The results indicated that although many variables had significant zero-order correlations with the SWLS, only a few variables had unique utility in predicting life satisfaction. Invariance analyses indicated that while the qualitative nature of life satisfaction remains constant across adult age, the influence of fluid intelligence on judgments of life satisfaction declines with age. In contrast, negative affect is negatively associated with life satisfaction consistently across the adult age span.

Keywords:

• Satisfaction With Life Scale
• subjective well-being
• aging
• invariance
• structural equation modeling

Acknowledgments

Data collection was supported by NIA grant R01 AG19627 to Timothy Salthouse. Elliot Tucker-Drob was supported as a trainee by a grant (T32AG020500) from the National Institute on Aging. We would like to thank the 2005 Salthouse Cognitive Aging Lab research assistants for all their help during the data collection process, with special thanks to Cris Rabaglia for her invaluable assistance. K. L. Siedlecki is now at Columbia University.

Notes

Note

1. This was achieved by fixing the variance of the latent life satisfaction variable to 1.0 in each of the groups, in order to define the metric of the latent variable.