This 3-year longitudinal study examined the associations between regret management, everyday activities, and retirement satisfaction among recent retirees. We hypothesized that the regulation of a severe life regret can facilitate activity engagement and retirement satisfaction, but only if retirees manage their regrets adaptively by either…

The present study examines the leisure style and leisure satisfaction of a sample of older people at baseline and after a period of 5 years. Three groups were identified by factorial and cluster analyses and labelled under the headings of: Organised Style, Surrounding Style and Indoor Style. Each group represented a different typology of leisure,…

One of the social identities held by people is defined by whether or not they smoke cigarettes. Although this identity can and does change for many people over the course of their lives, most research has not examined the effects of transitioning from a smoker to a non-smoker. Using a life span perspective, our analyses contrasted the extent to…

This article reports on a study of older community-dwelling Australian adults which aimed to test whether a relatively unexplored construct, proactive coping, could have a role in purpose in life, personal growth, and life satisfaction. A total of 109 women and 115 men (Mean age = 75.04 yrs, SD = 6.66) completed a questionnaire containing…

This study investigated age differences in multiple aspects of psychological well-being among midlife and older adults in Japan (N = 482) and the United States (N = 3,032) to test the hypothesis that older Japanese adults would rate aspects of their well-being (personal growth, purpose in life, positive relations with others) more highly that…

Enright and colleagues (1996) emphasized the beneficial effect of experiencing forgiveness across multiple domains. We build upon their conceptualization of forgiveness by adding a domain--forgiveness by God--to create global forgiveness. In the current study, we use data from a nationally representative study, the Religion, Aging and Health…

This study examines the hypothesis that the outcome of the Eriksonian crisis of integrity vs. despair is dependent on successful coping with four developmental tasks: maintenance of active involvement, reevaluation of life satisfaction, developing a sense of health maintenance, and reevaluation of the sense of coherence (SOC). A selective sample…

The primary goal of the study was to compare adult age groups on aging bias, with measures of knowledge of aging in the physical, psychological, and social domains and life satisfaction. The study sample, consisting of 752 men and women, 40 to 95 years of age, was tested using Neugarten, Havighurst, and Tobin's (1961) Life Satisfaction Index (LSI)…

As aging is occurring at a rate never before seen in South Korea, the present study examines the predictors of mental health in a nationally representative sample of older adults (n = 4,155), drawn from Wave I of the Korean Longitudinal Study on Aging. Findings show that sociodemographic factors, chronic health conditions, level of cognition, and…

This study investigated perceived strategies and activities for successful later aging. Participants were 242 members of the Terman Study of the Gifted who responded to an open-ended question concerning how they make the most of their aging years. Data were collected in 1996 and 1999, when the participants were average ages of 84 and 86.…

The current study proposes that personal need fulfillment (relatedness, generativity, identity, growth, and finances) predicts early and late retirement intentions. The personal needs of 160 full-time older employees were measured by personal goals, job satisfactions, job characteristics, and intrinsic motivation. Results suggest that the personal…

The purpose of this study was to examine the structure of retirees' social identity and its impact on satisfaction with retirement. From social identity theory formulations, we assumed that (1) retiree-identity was comprised of three distinct components (cognitive, evaluative, and affective), and (2) only the affective component would play a role…

This study reports the development and validation of a culturally sensitive, domain-specific measure of life satisfaction for Chinese Elders--The Life Satisfaction Scale-Chinese ("LSS-C"). The "LSS-C" was administered to 1,502 randomly-selected older Chinese persons in three newly developed towns in Mainland China. Confirmatory…

The present study examined what older people regret, and the relationships between regret, health and life satisfaction. The study also explored the role of secondary interpretive control beliefs in relation to regret. Participants (N = 228; 79-98 years old) were asked to report on the content and frequency of their regret, secondary interpretive…

The Meaningful Activity Participation Assessment (MAPA), a recently developed 28-item tool designed to measure the meaningfulness of activity, was tested in a sample of 154 older adults. The MAPA evidenced a sufficient level of internal consistency and test-retest reliability and correlated as theoretically predicted with the Life Satisfaction…