Stability and Change of Optimism and Pessimism in Late Midlife and Old Age Across Three Independent Studies

Research across a number of different areas in psychology has long shown that optimism and pessimism are predictive of a number of important future life outcomes. Despite a vast literature on the correlates and consequences, we know very little about how optimism and pessimism change across adulthood and old age and the sociodemographic factors that are associated with individual differences in such trajectories. In the present study, we conducted (parallel) analyses of standard items from the Life Orientation Test (Scheier & Carver, 1985) in three comprehensive data sets: Two-wave data from both the Berlin Aging Study II (N = 1,423, aged 60–88; M = 70.4, SD = 3.70) and the Midlife in the U.S. Study (N = 1,810 aged 60–84; M = 69.12, SD = 6.47) as well as cross-sectional data from the Survey of Health, Aging, and Retirement (N = 17,087, aged 60–99; M= 70.19, SD=7.53). Using latent change-regression models and locallyweighted smoothing curves revealed that optimism is on average very stable after age 60, with some evidence in Survey of Health,Aging, and Retirement of lowered optimism in very old age. Consistent across the three independent studies, pessimism evinced on average modest increases, ranging between.25 and.50 SD per 10 years of age. Of the sociodemographic factors examined, higher levels of education revealed the most consistent associations with lower pessimism, whereas gender evinced more study-specific findings. We take our results to demonstrate that age-related trajectories and correlates thereof differ for optimism and pessimism. Older adults appear to preserve into older ages those levels of optimistic expectations they have had at 60 years of age and show only modest increases in pessimism. We discuss possible reasons for these findings.