تاثیر شخصیت و زندگی حوادث بر روی رفاه ذهنی از دیدگاه محدوده زندگی

We investigate the relation between personality (Big Five) and positive and negative life events as predictors of subjective well-being (SWB) in a sample of 766 young, middle-aged, and old adults. Analyses comprised data on personality, SWB, and reconstructed positive and negative life events. Results for the total sample indicate a strong relation between neuroticism and SWB, and an important influence of reconstructed life events on SWB with a stronger effect for negative as compared to positive events. Age differences in the prediction of SWB emerge for personality and life events: extraversion is only a predictor of SWB in young adults and the effect of neuroticism is more pronounced in old adults. Moreover, the influence of negative life events on SWB is stronger in young and middle-aged adults as compared to old adults. These results emphasize the need to study dispositional and situational variables across the life span in order to better understand the underlying mechanisms of SWB.

To understand why people are happy and what the underlying causes of happiness are is of crucial importance for mankind and the major aspiration of research in subjective well-being (SWB). SWB is commonly understood as an umbrella term for life satisfaction, positive affect, and absence of negative affect (Lucas, Diener, & Suh, 1996), and has been shown to be quite stable over the lifetime, although prone to minor changes after significant life events (Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith, 1999). There is a large body of evidence suggesting that life circumstances and demographic factors fail to account for a substantial percentage of variance in SWB (for an overview see Diener et al., 1999 and Lyubomirsky et al., 2005). As a consequence, there has been a shift in SWB research away from the focus on external factors and demographics (bottom-up factors) to analyses of top-down processes, i.e. factors within the individual (e.g., Diener et al., 1999). However, despite the large impact of personality on SWB, other lines of research also show a substantial influence of life events on SWB. Thus, both considerations should be taken into account when trying to explain the psychological mechanism of SWB. In what follows, we will start by separately focusing on established evidence for the impact of personality and life events on SWB, before elaborating on their joint contributions to SWB. Finally, we suggest that the influence of personality and life events on SWB may vary across the life span as a function of age and propose an integrating approach covering these dimensions.