By Staff
ANN ARBOR - Back when he was 20 years old in 1965, rock star Pete Townshend wrote the line “I hope I die before I get old” into a song, “My Generation” that launched his band, the Who.
But a unique new study suggests that Townshend may have fallen victim to a common, and mistaken, belief:
That the happiest days of people's lives occur when they're young.
In fact, the study finds, both young people and older people think that young people are happier than older people - when in fact previous research has shown the opposite.
And while both older and younger adults tend to equate old age with unhappiness for other people, individuals tend to think they'll be happier than most in their old age.
In other words, the young Pete Townshend may have thought others of his generation would be miserable in old age.
And now that he's 61, he might look back and think he, himself was happier back then.
But the opposite is likely to be true: Older people “mis-remember” how happy
they were as youths, just as youths “mis-predict” how happy (or
unhappy) they will be as they age.
The study, performed by VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System and University
of Michigan researchers, involved more than 540 adults who were either
between the ages of 21 and 40, or over age 60. All were asked to rate or
predict their own individual happiness at their current age, at age 30
and at age 70, and also to judge how happy most people are at those
ages. The results are published in the June issue of the Journal of
Happiness Studies, a major research journal in the field of positive
psychology.
happy as they age, when in fact this study and others have shown that
people tend to become happier over time,” says lead author Heather
Lacey, Ph.D., a VA postdoctoral fellow and member of the U-M Medical
School's Center for Behavioral and Decision Sciences in Medicine.
happy, but older people believe they and others must have been happier
The findings have implications for understanding young people's
decisions about habits – such as smoking or saving money – that might
affect their health or finances later in life. They also may help
explain the fear of aging that drives middle-aged people to “midlife
crisis” behavior in a vain attempt to slow their own aging.
Stereotypes about aging abound in our society, Lacey says, and affect
the way older people are treated as well as the public policies that
affect them.
That's why research on the beliefs that fuel those one-size-fits-all
depictions of older people is important, she explains. The study is one
of the first ever to examine the ability of individuals to remember or
predict happiness over the lifespan. Most studies of happiness have
focused on people with chronic illness, disabilities or other major life
challenges, or have taken “snapshots” of current happiness among
older people.
The senior author of the new paper, Peter Ubel, M.D., has conducted
several of these studies, and has found that ill people are often
surprisingly happy, sometimes just as happy as healthy people. This
suggests an adaptability or resilience in the face of their medical
problems. Ubel is the director of the Center for Behavioral and Decision
Sciences in Medicine, an advisor to the RWJ Clinical Scholars Program,
and author of You're Stronger Than You Think: Tapping the Secrets of
Emotionally Resilient People (McGraw-Hill, 2006).
that if something good happens, they will experience long-lasting
happiness, or if something bad happens, they will experience long-term
misery,” he says. “But instead, people's happiness results more
from their underlying emotional resources – resources that appear to
grow with age. People get better at managing life's ups and downs, and
the result is that as they age, they become happier – even though their
objective circumstances, such as their health, decline.”
Lacey adds, “It's not that people overestimate their happiness, but
rather that they learn how to value life from adversities like being
sick. What the sick learn from being sick, the rest of us come to over
time.” The new study, she explains, sprang from a desire to see
whether the experience that comes with advancing age affects attitudes
and predictions about aging.
The study was done using an online survey with six questions, asked in
four different orders to reduce bias. The participants were part of
large group of individuals who had previously volunteered to take online
surveys, and chose to respond to the U-M/VA inquiry. The two age groups
were about equally divided between men and women. About 35 percent of
the younger group's members were from ethnic minority groups, compared
with 24 percent of the older group's members.
Each participant was asked to rate his or her own current level of
happiness on a scale of 1 to 10, and also to rate on that same scale how
happy an average person of their age would be. Each participant was also
asked to remember or predict (depending on their age) their level of
happiness at age 30 and at age 70, again on a scale of 1 to 10. They
were also asked to guess the happiness of the average person at each of
those ages.
To make sure that their online survey methodology didn't skew the
results by including an atypical group of older people, the researchers
compare the older group's happiness self-ratings with those from
self-ratings collected in other ways from people of the same age range.
They matched.
In all, a statistical analysis of the results show, people in the older
group reported a current level of happiness for themselves that was
significantly higher than the self-rating made by the younger group's
members. And yet, participants of all ages thought that the average
30-year-old would be happier than the average 70-year-old, and that
happiness would decline with age.
Interestingly, the younger people in the study predicted that they
themselves would be about as happy at age 70 as they were in younger
years, though they said that others their own age would probably get
less happy over time. And the older people in the study tended to think
that they'd be happier at older ages than other people would be.
This tendency to think of oneself as “above average” has been seen
in other studies of everything from driving ability to intelligence,
Lacey says. This bias may combine with negative attitudes about aging to
help explain the study's findings, she notes.
Further analysis of the study data will examine the impact of
individuals' core beliefs on their predictions and memory of
happiness.
Since completing the study, the researchers have gone back to study
people between the ages of 40 and 60, and hope to present those data
soon. They also plan to study how beliefs about happiness in young and
old age influence people's retirement planning and health care
decision making.
In addition to Lacey and Ubel, the study was co-authored by Dylan
Smith, Ph.D., a research investigator at the CDBSM. The center's web
site is www.cbdsm.org. The study was funded by the National Institute of
Child Health and Human Development, and by the Department of Veterans
Affairs. Reference: Journal of Happiness Studies, June 2006 Vol 7, Issue