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Beliefs about aging and health occur within the context of close relationships and shared experiences. Knowledge of couples' beliefs and health is necessary to support their individual and collective efforts to age successfully together.

Development in adulthood occurs through the process of setting and working toward goals. Emotions link experiences to goals and action, and as such are integral to goal setting, evaluation of goal progress, and goal pursuit. When viewed in the context of goals, the simultaneous experience of positive and negative or “mixed” emotions coheres with the complexity of goal pursuit within the context of competing demands in daily life. Mixed emotions may be experienced as uncertainty in which goal to prioritize, ambiguity in whether an event served or impeded goal progress, or poignancy in a bittersweet moment of recognizing the losses that accompany gains. Mixed emotions therefore represent a problem that must be resolved—through either prioritization of conflicting goals, down-playing negative affective response, or goal disengagement—before goal pursuit can continue. Because mixed emotions must be resolved before they can be translated to action, the experience of mixed emotions may evoke a new awareness of priorities and available options that leads to better goal outcomes. Over time, openness to mixed emotions could result in outcomes such as better health and self-actualization.

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A cumulative index allows for gradations in resources that can be compensated for by external factors such as person-environment congruence. This index could guide policy and interventions to enhance resources in vulnerable subgroups and diminish inequalities in successful aging outcomes.

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Beliefs about aging are grounded in social experience. This study considered the extent to which married older adults' shared beliefs about aging and markers of aging maintain a concurrent and enduring association with their partners' beliefs about and markers of aging. Data from the 2010/2012 and 2014/2016 waves of the Health and Retirement Study provided measures of husbands' and wives' (3,779 couples) positive and negative beliefs about aging and internal (Cystatin C) and external (grip strength) markers of aging at 2 time points. Latent dyadic models parsed beliefs and markers into partners' individual and shared variances, which were connected both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Longitudinal analysis showed that the cross-sectional associations between shared beliefs and markers of aging were stable over 4 years. Partners' shared beliefs and markers of aging were found to have enduring associations with each other over time. The enduring association between grip strength and future negative beliefs remained significant after accounting for partner selection and similarity in health. Model comparisons across marriage duration and emotional closeness showed partners' beliefs to be more similar in marriages that were either long established or emotionally close. In all groups, shared beliefs and markers of aging were associated with each other over time. The association between positive beliefs and future grip strength was stronger in long-established than in recent marriages. In summary, this study provides evidence that, within older couples, beliefs about aging are shaped in part through experiences of aging together.

Lifespan development involves setting and pursuing self-guided goals. This study examines how in the social domain, possible selves, a future-oriented self-concept, and self-regulation, including self-regulatory beliefs and intraindividual variability in self-regulatory behavior, relate to differences in overall daily social goal progress. An online older-adult sample worked towards a self-defined meaningful social goal over 100 days. Multilevel analysis showed that participants with social possible selves made higher overall daily goal progress, especially those with both hoped-for and feared possible selves, than those with possible selves in nonsocial domains. Self-regulatory beliefs were positively whereas variability was negatively associated with overall daily goal progress. The findings suggest that possible selves, in combination with two distinct self-regulatory constructs, significantly guide social goal progress.