Milestone Age Affects the Role of Health and Emotions in Life Satisfaction: A Preliminary Inquiry

Jill turns 40. Should this change how she evaluates her life, and would a similar change occur when she turns 41? Milestone age (e.g., 30, 40, 50)--a naturally occurring feature in personal timelines--has received much attention is popular culture, but little attention in academic inquiry. This stud...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2015-08, Vol.10 (8), p.e0133254-e0133254
Main Authors: Miron-Shatz, Talya, Bhargave, Rajesh, Doniger, Glen M
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Age
Aged
Aging - psychology
Analysis
Birthdays
Body mass
Body Mass Index
Body Weight
Decision making
Emotions
Female
Happiness
Health Status
Humans
Judgments
Life cycle engineering
Life cycles
Life sciences
Middle Aged
Personal Satisfaction
Psychological aspects
Quality of life
Quality of Life - psychology
Satisfaction (Psychology)
Self Concept
Suicides & suicide attempts
Young Adult
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Summary:Jill turns 40. Should this change how she evaluates her life, and would a similar change occur when she turns 41? Milestone age (e.g., 30, 40, 50)--a naturally occurring feature in personal timelines--has received much attention is popular culture, but little attention in academic inquiry. This study examines whether milestone birthdays change the way people evaluate their life. We show that life outlook is impacted by this temporal landmark, which appears to punctuate people's mental maps of their life cycle. At these milestone junctures, people take stock of where they stand and have a more evaluative perspective towards their lives when making life satisfaction judgments. Correspondingly, they place less emphasis on daily emotional experiences. We find that milestone agers (vs. other individuals) place greater weight on health satisfaction and BMI and lesser weight on daily positive emotions in their overall life satisfaction judgments, whereas negative emotions remain influential.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0133254