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With age comes a sense of peace and calm, Population Research Center study shows
Professors Ross and Mirowsky publish findings Social Science and Medicine
Aging brings a sense of peace and calm, according to a new study from the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin. Starting at about age 60, participants reported more feelings of ease and contentment than their younger counterparts.
Catherine Ross and John Mirowsky, professors of sociology, have published the findings in "Age and the Balance of Emotions" in the May 19 issue of Social Science and Medicine. The research was funded in part by the National Institute on Aging.
The findings reveal aging is associated with more positive than negative emotions, and more passive than active emotions, Ross said.
Previous research on emotions associated with aging focused on negative emotions, such as depression. However, a second dimension underlying emotions is an active versus passive dimension, which is less studied, but may be important in explaining how emotions shift as people age, according to the researchers.
"The passive/positive combination reveals that contentment, calm and ease are some of the most common emotions people feel as they age," Ross said. "Emotions that are both active and negative, such as anxiety and anger, are especially unlikely among the elderly."
The study examined 1,450 responses to the 1996 U.S. General Social Survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center, which included English-speaking people aged 18 and older. The gender distribution of the sample was 56 percent female and 44 percent male, and the racial distribution was 81 percent white, 14 percent African American and 5 percent other races.
Participants responded to statements such as "On how many days in the past seven days have you...felt that you couldn't shake the blues, felt sad, felt lonely, felt anxious and tense, felt worried, felt so restless that you couldn't sit long in a chair, felt angry at someone, felt mad at someone, felt outraged at something somebody had done, felt calm, felt at ease, felt contented, felt happy, felt overjoyed by something, felt excited about or interested in something, felt proud, felt embarrassed, felt ashamed."
The researchers then grouped the emotions in four categories: active, passive, positive and negative.
Secondary findings reveal women had more negative than positive emotions, and more passive than active emotions than men. Also, participants with higher income and education levels had significantly more positive emotions than those with lower income and education levels. |
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Professor Ari Adut's new book out in August
Dr Adut's book, On Scandal, is part of Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences series by Cambridge
Scandal is the quintessential public event. Here is the first general and comprehensive analysis of this ubiquitous moral phenomenon. Taking up wide-ranging cases in society, politics, and art, Ari Adut shows when wrongdoings generate scandals and when they do not. He focuses on the emotional and cognitive experience of scandals and the relationships among those who are involved in or exposed to them. This perspective explains variations in the effects, frequency, elicited reactions, outcomes, and strategic uses of scandals. On Scandal: Moral Disturbances in Society, Politics, and Art offers provocative accounts of the Oscar Wilde, Watergate, and Lewinsky affairs. Adut also employs the lens of scandal to address puzzles and questions regarding public life. Why is American politics plagued by sex scandals? What is the cause of the rise in political scandals in Western democracies? Why were Victorians sometimes very accommodating and other times very intolerant of homosexuality? What is the social logic of hypocrisy? Why has transgression been so central to modern art? |
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Health gap between married and unmarried people narrows, study shows
Debra Umberson and Hui Liu's recent findings published in Journal of Health and Social Behavior and New York Times
A long-standing sociological tenet is that marriage enhances health, a study by a recent Ph.D. graduate, Hui (Cathy) Liu, and professor Debra J. Umberson finds that the health gap between married and unmarried people has changed over the past three decades. Based on 32 years' National Health Interview Survey data, they find that the self-rated health of the never-married has improved over the past three decades. Moreover, the gap between the married and the never married has narrowed over time for men but not for women. In contrast, the self-rated health of the widowed, divorced, and separated worsened over time, relative to the married and the widening health gap between the married and the previously married is more pronounced for women than for me. These results highlight the importance of social change in shaping the impact of marital status on self-reported health and challenge long-held assumptions about gender, marital status, and health. The findings are in the September issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior. |
