Forecasting Life Satisfaction across Adulthood: Benefits of Seeing a Dark Future?

Frieder R. Lang, David Weiss, Denis Gerstorf and Gert Wagner

No 502, SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research from DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)

Abstract: Anticipating one's future self is a unique human capacity that contributes importantly to adaptation and health throughoutadulthood and old age. Using the adult lifespan sample of the national German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP; N > 10,000, age range 18-96 years), we investigated age-differential stability, correlates, and outcomes of accuracy in anticipation of future life satisfaction across six subsequent 5-year time intervals. As expected, we observed few age differences in current life satisfaction, but stronger age differences in future expectations: Younger adults anticipated improved future life satisfaction, overestimating their actual life satisfaction 5 years later. By contrast, older adults were more pessimistic about the future, generally underestimating their actual life satisfaction after 5 years. Such age differences persisted above and beyond the effects of self-rated health and income. Survival analyses revealed that in later adulthood, underestimating one's life satisfaction 5 years later was related to lower hazard ratios for disability (n = 735 became disabled) and mortality (n = 879 died) across 10 or more years, even after controlling for age, sex, education, income, and self-rated health. Findings suggest that older adults are more likely to underestimate their life satisfaction in the future, and that such underestimation was associated with positive health outcomes.

Keywords: Subjective well-being; future anticipation; optimism; aging; health; mortality; disability; SOEP (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 p.
Date: 2012
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-dem, nep-eur, nep-for and nep-neu
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:diw:diwsop:diw_sp502

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