‘Happiness increases as you grow old’
People tend to feel happier with age, but their overall level of well-being depends on when they were born, a new US study has found.
Researchers found that self-reported feelings of well-being tend to increase with age, but that people’s overall level of well-being depends on when they were born. Psychological scientist Angelina R Sutin at the National Institute on Aging (NIA) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in US, predicted that people in the same “birth cohort” — born around the same time — may have had unique experiences that shape the way they evaluate happiness and optimism. They hypothesised that the level of well-being a person reports would, therefore, vary according to his or her birth year.
Using two large-scale longitudinal studies, NIH’s Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging and the CDC’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, Sutin and colleagues looked at data from several thousand people over 30 years, including over 10,000 reports on well-being, health, and other factors.
When the researchers analysed the data across the whole pool of participants, older adults had lower levels of well-being than younger and middle-aged adults. But when they analysed the same data while taking birth cohort into account, a different trend appeared: Life satisfaction increased.
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