A nationally representative panel study of British households was used to examine the extent to which Big Five personality traits interact with the experience of major life events (marriage, childbirth, unemployment, and widowhood) to predict increases and decreases in life satisfaction following the event. Results show that major life events are associated with changes in life satisfaction, and some of these changes are very long lasting. Personality traits did not have consistent moderating effects on the association between stressful life events and life satisfaction over time.

Set-point theory posits that individuals react to the experience of major life events, but quickly adapt back to pre-event baseline levels of subjective well-being in the years following the event. A large, nationally representative panel study of Swiss households was used to examine set-point theory by investigating the extent of adaptation following the experience of marriage, childbirth, widowhood, unemployment, and disability. Our results demonstrate that major life events are associated with marked change in life satisfaction and, for some events (e.g., marriage, disability), these changes are relatively long lasting even when accounting for normative, age related change.

We used a nationally representative panel of Australian households to replicate a study by Yap et al. (2012) that evaluated how life satisfaction changed following major life events and the extent to which personality moderated those changes. We replicated the protective function of marriage but found that long-term declines that follow widowhood mostly reflect normative changes. In addition, we found that people reported slight decreases in positive affect following marriage and childbirth, an increase in positive affect following widowhood, and a slight increase in negative affect following childbirth, relative to normative trajectories. The Big Five did not moderate response to life events in a way that is consistent with past theory and research.

In this article, we evaluate the factor structure of the Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure (MEIM; Phinney, 1992) and test whether the MEIM exhibits measurement invariance across ethnic groups taken from a diverse sample of students from 30 different colleges and universities across the United States (N = 9,625). Initial analyses suggested that a bifactor model was an adequate representation of the structure of the MEIM. This model was then used in subsequent invariance tests. Results suggested that the MEIM displayed configural and metric invariance across 5 diverse ethnic groups (i.e., White, Black, Hispanic, East Asian, and South Asian). There were indications that the MEIM displayed a similar factor structure with roughly equivalent factor loadings across diverse ethnic groups. However, there was little evidence of scalar invariance across these groups, suggesting that mean-level comparisons of MEIM scores across ethnic groups should be interpreted with caution. The implications of these findings for the interpretation and use of this popular measure of ethnic identity are discussed.

Few empirical studies have explored the mechanisms through which racial identity, the importance of racial group membership, affects well-being for racial/ethnic minorities. Using a community sample of 161 African American adults, the present study examined whether the association between racial identity (centrality, public regard, and private regard) and life satisfaction is mediated by two identity functions, belongingness and discrimination. Our results indicated that the relationships of centrality and private regard with life satisfaction were mediated by perceptions of belongingness. Furthermore, gender moderated the strength of each of these mediating effects, such that belongingness mediated these relationships for women but not for men. Our results also indicated that the relationship between public regard and life satisfaction was mediated by perceptions of discrimination. Furthermore, higher public regard was related to lower perceptions of discrimination for women but not men. However, a combined model for public regard and life satisfaction as mediated by discrimination failed to show moderated mediation. We discuss these results in relation to research and theory on racial identity and intersectionality.