Despite remarkable stability of life satisfaction across the life span, it may be adaptive to perceive change in life satisfaction. We shed new light on this topic with data from 766 individuals from three age groups and past, present, and future life satisfaction perceptions across the life span. On average, participants were most satisfied with their current life. When looking back, satisfaction increased from past to present, and when looking ahead, satisfaction decreased into the future. Trajectories were best fitted with a curvilinear growth model. Neuroticism and extraversion predicted the level of trajectories, but none of the Big Five predicted the slope. We conclude that humans have an adaptive capacity to perceive the present life as being the best possible.
To understand how individuals perceive their lives and how this perception changes when looking back and ahead across their entire life is a key to investigating the potential adaptive capacity of self-perception for human functioning. In this article, we focus on subjective perceptions of life satisfaction trajectories; that is, how individuals rate their past, present, and future life satisfaction across their entire life span. This notion of looking back to evaluate one’s past and looking ahead to envision one’s future entails intraindividual temporal comparisons that trace back to propositions of implicit theories to reconstruct the past as a function of the present self (Ross, 1989), temporal comparison processes (e.g., Albert, 1977 and Wilson and Ross, 2001), possible (past and future) selves (e.g., Markus & Nurius, 1986), self-deception (Robinson & Ryff, 1999), and affective forecasting (Wilson & Gilbert, 2005). The common ground of these approaches is that the self operates as a construction of the past, the present, and the future with self-evaluative processes to compare the present with the past life (i.e., perceived improvement vs. impairment) and the present with the future life (i.e., anticipated improvement vs. impairment). Such subjective perceptions lie at the core of the present study, which focused on perceived trajectories of past, present, and future life satisfaction across the life span. In doing so, we shed new light on previous studies that found life satisfaction to be generally rated far above the neutral point (e.g., Diener, 2000) and remarkably stable across adulthood both in cross-sectional (e.g., Diener and Suh, 1998 and Hamarat et al., 2002) and longitudinal studies (e.g., Baird et al., 2010 and Mroczek and Spiro, 2005), with significant decline only in old age (e.g., Gerstorf et al., 2008). Thus, despite remarkable stability in actual trajectories of life satisfaction, subjective perceptions of life satisfaction trajectories may vary across the life span and provide the ground for a human adaptive capacity to maintain a consistent view of the self (Jones, 1973).
