Psychological wellbeing, health and ageing

By Andrew Steptoe, Angus Deaton, Arthur A. Stone. The Lancet, 2014

1,993 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary Psychological wellbeing and health are closely linked at older ages. Three aspects of psychological wellbeing can be distinguished: evaluative wellbeing (or life satisfaction), hedonic wellbeing (feelings of happiness, sadness, etc), and eudemonic wellbeing (sense of purpose and meaning in life). We review recent advances in this field, and present new analyses concerning the pattern of wellbeing across ages and the association between wellbeing and survival at older ages. The Gallup World Poll, an ongoing survey in more than 160 countries, shows a U-shaped relationship between evaluative wellbeing and age in rich, English speaking countries, with the lowest levels of wellbeing around ages 45-54. But this pattern is not universal: for example, respondents from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe show a large progressive decline in wellbeing with age; Latin America also shows falling wellbeing with age, while wellbeing in sub-Saharan Africa shows little change with age. The relationship between physical health and subjective wellbeing is bidirectional. Older people suffering from illnesses such as coronary heart disease, arthritis and chronic lung disease show both raised levels of depressed mood and impaired hedonic and eudemonic wellbeing. Wellbeing may also have a protective role in health maintenance. In an illustrative analyses from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), we find that eudemonic wellbeing is associated with longer survival; 29.3% of people in the lowest wellbeing quartile died over the average follow-up period of 8.5 years compared with 9.3% of those in the highest quartile. Associations were independent of age, gender, demographic factors, and baseline mental and physical health. We conclude that the wellbeing of the elderly is an important objective for both economic and health policy. Current psychological and economic theories do not adequately account for the variations in pattern of wellbeing with age across different parts of the world. The apparent association between wellbeing and survival is consistent with a protective role of high wellbeing, but alternative explanations cannot be ruled out at this stage.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Health, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/457e3448329438dfb21d2746ed24010f034ac552

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In General Health Professions

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In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Clarifying the Concept of Well-Being: Psychological Need Satisfaction as the Common Core Connecting Eudaimonic and Subjective Well-Being (2019, background): “…2018; Diener, 2012; Diener et al., 1999), again, many researchers have argued that life satisfaction and affect should be complemented with a third separate dimension, namely, EWB (Dolan et al., 2011; National Research Council, 2013; OECD, 2013; Steptoe et al., 2015; Tennant et al., 2007).”
Advances and Open Questions in the Science of Subjective Well-Being (2018, neutral): “For instance, Steptoe, Deaton, and Stone (2015) found that in many countries around the world SWB declines linearly with age, and it is only in wealthy Western nations that the U-shaped curve is found.”
Unequal hopes and lives in the USA: optimism, race, place, and premature mortality (2019, background): “And individuals with a greater sense of purpose—described as eudemonic well-being by some economists and psychologists, and as “flourishing” by others— also tend to live longer (Steptoe et al. 2015; Keyes and Simoes 2012).”
Well-being is more than happiness and life satisfaction: a multidimensional analysis of 21 countries (2020, background): “Certainly, it is well known that higher income is related to higher subjective well-being and better health and life expectancy [1, 42], so reduced income following unemployment is likely to lead to increased inequalities.”