Life Satisfaction

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The Journal of Positive Psychology

Vol. 3, No. 3, July 2008, 153–164

Life satisfaction across adulthood: different determinants at different ages?

Karen L. Siedlecki*, Elliot M. Tucker-Drob, Shigehiro Oishi and Timothy A. Salthouse

Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA

(Received 27 August 2007; final version received 23 October 2007)

It is likely that with aging and changing life circumstances, individuals’ values shift in systematic ways, and that

these shifts may be accompanied by shifts in the determinants of their subjective judgments of well being.

To examine this possibility, the relations among the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) and a number of

personality, affect, demographic, and cognitive variables were examined in a sample of 818 participants between

the ages of 18 and 94. The results indicated that although many variables had significant zero-order correlations

with the SWLS, only a few variables had unique utility in predicting life satisfaction. Invariance analyses

indicated that while the qualitative nature of life satisfaction remains constant across adult age, the influence of

fluid intelligence on judgments of life satisfaction declines with age. In contrast, negative affect is negatively

associated with life satisfaction consistently across the adult age span.

Keywords: Satisfaction With Life Scale; subjective well-being; aging; invariance; structural equation modeling

Introduction

Subjective well-being (SWB) is often conceptualized as

having cognitive-judgmental components, characterized by life satisfaction, and emotional components,

characterized by the presence of positive affect and

the absence of negative affect (Diener, Suh, Lucas, &

Smith, 1999). There is strong evidence to suggest that

these cognitive and emotional components are related

both to a host of individual difference variables and

to...