title: Forecasting life satisfaction across adulthood: benefits of seeing a dark future?
abstract: Anticipating one's future self is a unique human capacity that contributes importantly to adaptation and health throughout adulthood and old age. Using the adult life span sample of the national German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP; N > 10,000, age range 18 to 96 years), we investigated age-differential stability, correlates, and outcomes of accuracy in anticipation of future life satisfaction across 6 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.
authors: Institute of Psychogerontology, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. flang@geronto.uni-erlangen.de
authors: Frieder R
authors: FR
authors: Lang
authors: David
authors: D
authors: Weiss
authors: Denis
authors: D
authors: Gerstorf
authors: Gert G
authors: GG
authors: Wagner
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology* / Q000523:psychology; D059031:Anticipation, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005858:Germany; D006306:Health Surveys; D006801:Humans; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010549:Personal Satisfaction; D011237:Predictive Value of Tests; D012649:Self Concept; D016019:Survival Analysis; D055815:Young Adult