Title: The effect of age on positive and negative affect: A developmental perspective on happiness.
Abstract: The effect of age on happiness, as defined by positive and negative affect, was examined in a survey of 2,727 persons of a broad age range (25-74) conducted by the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Midlife Development.The age-affect association was examined, controlling for a host of sociodemographic, personality, and contextual influences.Among women, age was related to positive affect nonlineariy but was unrelated to negative affect.Among men, age interacted with 2 key variables in predicting affect: extraversion and marital status.These findings lend support to recent life span theories of emotion and indicate that personality, contextual, and sociodemographic variables, as well as their interactions, are all needed to fully understand the age-affect relationship.People differ in their level of happiness, also known as wellbeing.For many years, social scientists have attempted to explain these differences.In many of the early, classic studies (Andrews & Withey, 1976;Bradburn, 1969;Campbell, Converse, & Rodgers, 1976;Gurin, Veroff, & Feld, 1960;Veroff, Douvan, & Kulka, 1981) it was assumed that sociodemographic and social structural variables, such as age, gender, marital status, and income, explained the individual differences in happiness.This was known as the "social indicators movement" in well-being research (Ryff, Keyes, & Hughes, 1998), which held that some sociodemographically defined groups (e.g., married people, those with higher incomes, younger people) were happier than others because of differential availability of psychological, physical, and material resources.In essence, individual differences in well-being were thought to be by-products of these group differences.More recent work, though, has cast doubt on this early perspective.The influence of sociodemographics is modest, explaining only a small portion of the individual differences in happiness (Brim,