"The image of youth or young adulthood as the best time of life is probably not an accurate stereotype."
The Washington Post makes sense of several studies pointing to the greater happiness of older adults in Older Adults May Be Happier Than Younger Ones.
The important finding that people who are biologically older are happier than younger adults runs counter to many people's expectations.
The younger adults, Smith said, had less trouble with their health but had many more of the other kinds of predicaments, and those, in the long run, tended to trump their better health.
Yet another study, Smith said, looked at job satisfaction among people of different ages and again found that those who kept working past age 65 had the highest level of job satisfaction -- going against the stereotype that older people keep working mostly because they can't do without the money.
--
The studies present an interesting puzzle, said Catherine Ross, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin. Yang's finding that older adults are generally happier than younger ones seems superficially at odds with many studies that have found that older people are at higher risk for depression and other mental health problems.
--
In line with Yang's findings, Ross and Mirowsky found that advanced age was positively correlated with feeling positive emotions. But the researchers also found that being older was negatively correlated with active emotions. Older people, in other words, had both more positive and more passive emotional states.
"A lot of research in different areas finds the elderly have higher levels of depression, so it looked as though mental health was bad among the elderly," she said. "What this study does is say, 'Yeah, it is not that the elderly have negative emotions, but that when they are negative, they are passive.' "
--
Young people -- the very people we think from the stereotype are best off -- in fact have high levels of anger and anxiety and also high levels of depression, compared to middle-aged adults."
Younger adults were far more likely to have financial worries, troubled emotional relationships and professional stressors, she said.