Do People Get Happier As They Get Older

Jet, Nov 30, 1998

Believe it or not, things do get better with age.

A new study bas found that the older you get, the happier you may become.

The revealing study by Dr. Daniel K. Mroczek, assistant professor of psychology at Fordham University in New York City, shows that happiness increases as you get older.

"I think the popular assumption that our sense of well-being declines as we get older is wrong," says Mroczek.

The study surveyed more than 2,000 adults from the ages of 25 to 74 to find out about their level of happiness and life satisfaction.

The researchers examined positive. and negative emotions such as sadness, hopelessness, a sense of worthlessness and nervousness in relation to age.

The study also looked for a correlation between age and a host of other issues including stress, health and an outgoing personality.

The researchers analyzed information taken from the respondents of a national telephone and mail survey from the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Mid-Life Development.

The study discovered that the older respondents more frequently reported positive emotions such as good spirits, cheerfulness and overall happiness, the New York Times noted.

The results of the study, published in the November issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, show that older people are happier than younger adults, which holds true regardless of gender, marital status, education, stress, personality and physical health.

Older, extroverted married men appear to be the happiest with age, the study notes.

Older women also told researchers they have more positive emotions as they get older.

The study does not give any concrete reasons for why older people claim to be happier as they age.

But one possible reason the current generation of older males may be the happiest is that they have lived through the Great Depression, World War II and the Korean War, and therefore already have seen the worst of times. They have seen so much in their lifetime that nothing really surprises them, nothing really upsets them, observers note. And because older people have survived so much, they feel more positive when faced with other hardships.

However, the study suggests that perhaps today's older people are just simply happier than past or future generations. Or perhaps unhappy people simply tend to die earlier than happy people. Or maybe the respondents in the survey were less willing to reveal any feelings of unhappiness.

And still, observers note that perhaps today's older people have learned the importance of living for now, for today, and recognize that tomorrow is not promised. They are getting older, some are in poor health and some have seen more and more friends die. Yet, they are simply happy just to still be alive.

The study's author says he believes that older people may be better than younger ones at regulating their emotions, increasing positive feelings and decreasing negative ones because they have learned how to avoid the things that make them angry or frustrated.

Other research has supported the Fordham study that happiness does indeed increase with age.

Dr. Laura Carstensen, a Stanford University psychologist who also has done research on aging and happiness, believes that older people may feel happier because they have had a lifelong practice of regulating their emotions.

"It's not that old people are happy-go-lucky," she told the New York Times, "but that there is an appreciation of life that is associated with a sense of well-being and satisfaction."

Dr. Mroczek has written and presented widely on the subject of personality and emotional development in older adults and is currently studying how personality changes in middle-aged and older adults affect their physical and mental health.

His recent Fordham study also explored the issue of "the paradox of well-being."

The paradox states that the things that common sense would say are most likely to cause a person to be unhappy, like aging, illness, the death of a spouse, aren't always true. While the popular notion of the depressive older person persists, and such people do exist, these people are not the norm, the study's author believes.

The study offers hope for people that the twilight years do not have to be a depressing and frightening period in one's life.

Life really does get better with age, the study maintains.