Programs that enable older adults with some cognitive decline to remain in their own homes, where most older people prefer to live, may add to their happiness and quality of life, Bardo suggests. Ideally, these findings will contribute toward reducing some of the stigma and fear.” “Some cognitive decline is a normal process. “People are frightened by the idea of dementia,” he points out. The study’s main takeaway is that “even when cognitive impairment does occur, older adults can expect a large proportion of those remaining years to be happy ones,” Bardo says. Happy years of life were shown to substantially exceed the number of years one can expect to live with some cognitive impairment, on average,” Bardo reports. “Our findings show that happiness and cognitive impairment do coexist. Of those five years with cognitive impairment, the average person will live 4.4 years happy and about seven months (0.8 years) unhappy. On average, 65-year-olds can expect five out of 18 total years of remaining life to be lived with some cognitive impairment, the study found. If respondents needed a proxy to respond for them, the researchers categorized them as unhappy because the proxy version of the survey did not include questions about happiness. “This is a simple yet valid and reliable measure that is commonly used to assess how one feels about her or his overall quality of life,” Bardo says. It gauged happiness by asking whether respondents were happy all or most of the time or some or none of the time in the past week. The study incorporated tests that examined participants’ ability to recall words and count backwards, among other tasks. They analyzed data for 1998 to 2014 from the nationally representative Health and Retirement Study. Older adults can be happy and have a high quality of life despite experiencing some cognitive impairment, Bardo and Lynch show. Older People Report Happiness Despite Cognitive Impairment But more research is needed to confirm whether these actions can make and keep us happy or whether happy people are just more likely to do them. But other studies find that satisfaction with life and positive emotions decline with mobility problems and the deaths of spouses and other loved ones.ĭespite puzzling society-wide patterns, research offers clues on how individuals might buffer their losses and buoy their spirits as they age, including staying involved in meaningful activities and maintaining a positive outlook. Research by Bardo and Scott Lynch of Duke University shows that the cognitive impairment than can accompany aging does not preclude happiness and a high quality of life. “It’s a very heated area of study,” says Anthony Bardo of the University of Kentucky. On average, people in the United States are happiest and most satisfied with their lives when they’re young, experience a decline in both metrics in their 40s (often called a midlife crisis), and then rebound in their 60s.īut what happens after age 65? Do spirits stay high in later life? How is happiness affected by events that happen as people age-like the onset of disabling health conditions or chronic pain, or the deaths of partners and friends?įindings are mixed and researchers disagree it depends on how, when, and to whom you ask these questions.
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