Time-to-death-related change in positive and negative affect among older adults approaching the end of life.

Abstract

Late-life development may imply terminal processes related with time-to-death rather than with chronological age. In this study, we applied the time-to-death perspective to affective well-being. Using a 15-year observational interval including five measurement occasions with a large sample of deceased participants (N = 1,671; mean age = 75.60; mean time-to-death = 6.83 years, at first occasion) from the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam (LASA), we examined (1) whether intraindividual trajectories in positive (PA) and negative affect (NA) can be better described in terms of time-to-death as compared to chronological age; (2) whether time-to-death-related change in PA and NA follows a terminal decline (linear change) versus terminal drop (accelerating change) pattern, and (3) whether transition points in PA and NA, marking the beginning of the terminal change period, can be identified. For both PA and NA, multilevel mixed models of linear and quadratic time-to-death and age-related trajectories confirmed that time-to-death accounts for more intraindividual variance and reveals a better fit to the data than chronological age. Quadratic time-to-death-related trends fitted better than linear trajectories, thus indicating terminal drop of affective well-being, in terms of decreases of PA and increases of NA accelerating as death comes close. Also, change of NA was linked to time-to-death more strongly than PA change. Transition points to the terminal phase were found at 5.6 and 3.7 years for PA and NA, respectively. In conclusion, affective development toward the end of the human life span may be better understood as a death-related-rather than age-graded-process.

Factorial Structure and Measurement Invariance of the PANAS in Spanish Older Adults

“…However, contrary to the proposals of Pinquart (2001), and Vogel et al (2012) the present findings do not support a non-linear hypothesis about the relationship between age and affect.…”

“…For decades, research has shown inconsistent findings concerning whether old and very-old adults differ in their levels of affective well-being (Charles et al, 2010;Pinquart, 2001;Vogel, Schilling, Wahl, Beekman, & Penninx, 2012).…”

Psychological vulnerability to daily stressors in old age

“…This suggested that older people might do better in avoiding negative affective arousal in their everyday life (note, however, that age-related decline of NA was not consistently confirmed in all studies [24,32]). In contrast, recent evidence on terminal decline in affective well-being points to the limits of self-regulatory processes in the late phase of life [17,36,48,50]. Altogether, changes of affective well-being in old age lead to the question whether affective reactivity to daily stressors changes in a systematic age-related way across the adult life span.…”

Terminal decline in well-being: The role of social orientation.

“…Though not independent of one another, the convergence of findings across approaches adds to the credibility of our results about the importance of social resources for late-life well-being. We also consider it important to keep the single-phase model because it helps connecting the current study to the large majority of earlier reports on late-life well-being that were based on relatively few data points and thus did not allow apply multi-phase models (Berg, Hassing, Thorvadsson, & Johansson, 2011; Carmel, Shrira, & Shmotkin, 2013; Diehr, Williamson, Burke, & Psaty, 2002; Mroczek & Spiro, 2005; Palgi, Shrira, Ben-Ezra, Spalter, Shmotkin, & Kavé, 2010; Palgi, Shrira, Ben-Ezra, Spalter, Kavé, & Shmotkin, 2014; Schilling et al, 2013; Vogel, Schilling, Wahl, Beekman, & Penninx, 2012; Windsor, Gerstorf, & Luszcz, 2015). …”