Personality, Aging and Happiness

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Personality, Aging and Happiness

• Dan Mroczek
• Purdue University
• West Lafayette, Indiana
• This work was supported by a grant from the
  National Institutes of Health (R01-AG18436).

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Personality Traits, the Aging Process and
Happiness

• Easterlin has pointed out that policy initiatives
  to improve well-being via income may fail, as
  money does not buy happiness, but marriage and
  physical health do.
• Additionally, the empirical record shows that
  besides marriage and health, personality traits
  are powerful predictors of SWB, especially
  extraversion and neuroticism (e.g., Diener).
• Moreover, there are important changes in SWB that
  are associated with the aging process.

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Personality is Predictive of Happiness over 13
Years

• 1975 Extraversion 1975 Neuroticism
• 1988 Global SWB .26 -.30
• 1988 Happy Now .19 -.27
• N1,449 All correlations significant, p lt .0001

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There is Aging-Related Change in SWB, Even Over
Long Periods

• A burgeoning literature has documented long-term
  change in various aspects of SWB, often over very
  long periods (Charles et al, 2001 Mroczek
  Spiro, 2005).
• Such studies require longitudinal data, where the
  same people are followed for many years or
  decades and multiple measurements are obtained.

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Change in SWB in Older Adulthood

• 1,927 midlife and older men from the VA Normative
  Aging Study in Boston.
• Most are WWII or Korea veterans.
• Mean age of 55 at start of follow up period.
• SWB assessed via the LSI (Neugarten, Havighurst
  Tobin, 1961)

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Longitudinal Design and Data Analytic Model

• SWB was assessed up to 9 times per person from
  1978 through 1999.
• Estimated long-term change in SWB via random
  coefficient modeling (e.g., growth-curve
  modeling)
• LSij ?0i ?1i(ageij) ?2i(ageij)2 ?ij

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The Trajectory of SWB in Midlife Older
Adulthood
From Mroczek Spiro (2005) Journal of
Personality Social Psychology
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Long-Term SWB Trajectories by Mean and /- 1 SD
on Extraversion
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Summary of Key Findings

• SWB increases up until almost age 70 then
  decreases.
• However, there are individual differences in
  level, rate of change, and curvature---people
  change at different rates as they grow older.
• Extraversion explain some of the individual
  differences in the functional forms of the
  trajectories.

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Implications for the Economics of Happiness

• 1. More multi-year longitudinal studies are
  required. There is clear systematic change in SWB
  that takes place at a long-term, macro level of
  analysis. This has relevance for hedonic
  adaptation May work in the short-run, but not in
  the long-run.
• 2. Individual difference variables such as
  personality traits play a role not only in
  predicting peoples level of SWB, but how they
  change on SWB.

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Thank you for your attention.