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Innov Aging
Innov Aging
innovateage
Innovation in Aging
2399-5300 Oxford University Press US 

10.1093/geroni/igaa057.1485
igaa057.1485
Abstracts
Session 2980 (Poster)
Emotional Health and Regulation
AcademicSubjects/SOC02600
The Age and Well-Being Paradox Revisited: A Multidimensional Perspective
Hansen Thomas  
Oslo Metropolitan University, Oslo, Norway
2020 
16 12 2020 
16 12 2020 
4 Suppl 1 Program Abstracts from The GSA 2020 Annual Scientific Meeting “Turning 75: Why Age Matters”459 459
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America.2020This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Abstract
Much gerontological research has focused on the paradoxical observation that older people, despite their lower objective quality of life, report higher well-being than younger people. High well-being in old age is believed to be caused by adaptation, emotional regulation, and accommodative strategies. We aim to add nuance by examining whether the “paradox” holds across dimensions of well-being; for men and women; in young old and old-old age; and before introducing statistical controls (e.g for health and social factors). Using fixed effects models and 15-years panel data from the Norwegian NorLAG study (n=2,700, age 40+), we explore age-related changes in cognitive, affective, and eudaimonic dimensions of wellbeing. Results indicate a general pattern of stability well into older age, but negative changes in advanced age, cross-sectionally and longitudinally, and for each well-being measure. Declines in well-being are less pronounced and with a later onset for the cognitive compared with the other measures. Results are similar for men and women. Loss of health and partner are the main causes of declining well-being in older age. Findings suggest qualifications to the “well-being paradox”, e.g.: some dimensions of well-being remain more stable than others; across dimensions of well-being change is more negative in old-old than in young-old age; and patterns of increasing well-being in older age are more pronounced after controlling for age-related changes in health and social roles. We argue that the use of controls makes for false impressions of the psychological changes that actually occur when people grow older.