Sense of purpose and work
Today, I address two studies relating to older adults. First, Pfund, Strecher, Kross & Hill (2023) published “Sense of Purpose and Strategies for Coping with Anxiety Across Adulthood” in GeroPsych: The Journal of Gerontopsychology and Geriatric Psychiatry. Here’s the edited abstract:
Sense of purpose—the feeling that one has meaningful goals and directions in life—has consistently been connected to desirable well-being outcomes. Though these associations are robust, only a paucity of research explains why this connection exists and whether it differs across the adult lifespan. In a large cross-sectional sample (N = 1,666; age: M = 49.44, SD = 21.55), age showed a moderate positive association with sense of purpose and a large negative association with anxiety symptoms. Sense of purpose was negatively associated with anxiety and showed moderate to strong associations with how people regulate their emotions in anxiety-inducing situations. Sense of purpose had the strongest associations with adaptive emotion-regulation strategies connected to perspective broadening: When they feel anxious, people with a higher sense of purpose were more likely to find a silver lining, focus on the big picture, and remember that the stressor will not last. Furthermore, sense of purpose moderated the relationship between age and three maladaptive emotion-regulation strategies (eating/drinking to cope, expressive suppression, and distraction). In particular, higher levels of sense of purpose correlated with a stronger negative relationship between age and the use of these strategies. We discuss the findings regarding integrating the purpose and emotion-regulation literature.
I think this study is important in illustrating the power of sense of purpose to reduce the likelihood of maladaptive strategies in response to anxiety-inducing situations. The next study makes a fairly self-evident, but important contribution to our understanding of work. Asselmann & Specht (2023) published “Working Life as a Double-Edged Sword: Opposing changes in subjective well-being surrounding the transition to work and retirement” in Emotion. Here’s the edited abstract:
The work role is crucial for one’s identity and subjective well-being. From a role enhancement perspective, subjective well-being might increase after the transition to work and decrease after retirement. From a role strain perspective, the opposite might be true. Thus, entering and leaving working life might have benefits and costs, leading to improvements in some but impairments in other well-being indicators. To test these assumptions, we examined short- and long-term changes in life satisfaction, happiness, sadness, anxiety, and anger in the 5 years before and 5 years after the transition to work and retirement, respectively. Between 2007 and 2019, each facet of subjective well-being was repeatedly assessed in 2,720 (expectant) career starters and 2,007 (expectant) retirees from the German Socio-Economic-Panel Study. Multilevel analyses adjusted for time-dependent confounders indicated that young adults were more satisfied with their lives in (but not beyond) the first year of working life compared to before, which is in line with set-point theory. In the first 5 years of working life, career starters became happier but also angrier, supporting both the role enhancement and the role strain perspective. Older adults became less satisfied, less happy, sadder, and more anxious in the 5 years before retirement. However, in and after the first year of retirement, they were more satisfied, happier, less anxious, and less angry than before, supporting the role strain perspective. Our findings show that working life is a double-edged sword that influences individual well-being indicators in partially opposing ways.
I love the very large samples of both younger and older workers and the use of social psychological constructs in understanding the ambivalence people have about work at both the beginning and end of their working lives.