Well-being, Elderly Long Term Care, Integrated Community Based Care, Mental Health, Silver Economy

1. Psychological Wellbeing in
Elderly People
Psychological aspects and Ageing
Stella I. Tsartsara
stsartsara@gmail.com

2. Definition of Wellbeing
Psychological factors
• Cognitive function
• Happiness
• Life Satisfaction
• Self – growth
External determinants
• Income
• Environment
• Social circumstances
• Religion
• National mentality
• General good health

3. What is Subjective Wellbeing (SWB)?
Three aspects of subjective wellbeing can be distinguished—
• evaluative wellbeing (or life satisfaction),
• hedonic wellbeing (feelings of happiness, sadness, anger, stress, and pain),
• and eudemonic wellbeing (sense of purpose and meaning in life).
SWB, in fact, is ‘a broad category of phenomena that includes people’s emotional responses,
domain satisfactions, and global judgements of life satisfaction’ (Diener et al., 1999: p. 277).
Specifically, reported SWB consists of two distinctive components (cf. Diener, 1994: p. 106): an
affective part, which refers to both the presence of positive affect (PA) and the absence of
negative affect (NA), and a cognitive part. The affective part is a hedonic evaluation guided by
emotions and feelings, while the cognitive part is an information-based appraisal of one’s life for
which people judge the extent to which their life so far measures up to their expectations and
resembles their envisioned ‘ideal’ life.

4. FACTORS THAT DETERMINE THE SUBJECTIVE WELLBEING
People age differently. In Ageing there is interpersonal variability and
intrapersonal plasticity. The difference lies at the variability of Plasticity in
the following domains:
NEURONAL / NEUROCHEMICAL PLASTICITY
• Brain Development: AnatomicalDifferentiation, Neurogenesis,Synaptogenesis,etc.
• Biogeneticsof Human Development
• Neuronal Modelling,Animal Models
BEHAVIORAL/PSYCHOLOGICAL PLASTICITY
• Learning/Practice
• Acquisition of Sensorimotor Skills
• Basic Cognitive and Cultural Competencies
• Peak Performance (Expertise) in General and Person Specific Domains
SOCIETAL PLASTICITY
• Cross-Cultural,Cross-Society, Historical Analyses
• Social Differentiation: Study of Inequalities/Constraintsby Age, Gender, Ethnicity, Class
• Health Policy Comparison: Longevity/Morbidity
• Educational Comparison
• Age-Graded Opportunity/Constraint StructureAnalysis

5. Why we need to measure WB?

9. Loss of Wellbeing is related to -
• The Physical process
• The Psychological process
and meaning of life
• The Environmental process
• The Employment/Financial
Process

11. Cross – cultural
effects of
Wellbeing in
elderly people
Between genders, ethnicities, state
systems, societal status and races.

12. Key messages from cross-country longitudinal studies
Three measures: life evaluation, hedonic experience and meaningfulness
• In high-incomeEnglish-speaking countries, life evaluation dips in middle age, and
rises in old age, but this U-shape pattern does not hold in three other regions
(countries of the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and
Latin America and the Caribbean) where life evaluation decreases with age
• Outside high-income English-speakingcountries, worry, lack of happiness, and
physical pain rise with age, whereas anger and stress decrease!
• In the former Soviet Union and eastern European countries, elderly people are
particularlydisadvantaged relative to young people, in terms of lower life evaluation
and high levels of worry, low happiness, and physical pain
• A two-way relation between physical health and subjective wellbeing exists; poor
health leads to reduced subjective wellbeing, while high wellbeing can reduce physical
health impairments
• Evidence shows that subjective wellbeing is associated
with longer survival

19. Conclusions
• Evidence suggests that positive
hedonic states, life evaluation,
and eudemonic wellbeing are
relevant to HLY as people age.
• Health-care systems should be
concerned not only with illness
and disability, but also with
supporting methods to improve
positive psychological states.
• We do not yet know whether
wellbeing is sufficiently
modifiable by psychological,
societal, or economic
interventions to test effects on
health outcomes.
• WB is linked with Behavioural
Economics

20. References
• Arthur, S. & Mackie, C., 2013. Subjective well-being; Measuring happiness, suffering,
and other dimensions of experience, Available at:
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-90-481-2350-6_2.
• Audit Commission, 2004. Older people – independence and well-being. , (July).
• Breese, C. & Ph, D., 2005. Emotional Well ‐ Being. , (2002), pp.1–16.
• Commission, E. & Affairs, S., Mental Health and Well-Being in Older People – Making it
Happen. Strategy, pp.1–24.
• Hoorn, A., 2007. a Short Introduction To Subjective Well-Being : Its Measurement ,.
International Studies, (April), pp.2–3.
• Momtaz, Y.A. et al., 2013. Dyadic effects of attitude toward aging on psychological well-
being of older Malaysian couples: An actor-partner interdependence model. Clinical
Interventions in Aging, 8, pp.1413–1420.
• State of Global Well – Being. Gallup/Healthways 2013
• Steptoe, A., Demakakos, P. & de Oliveira, C., 2012. The Psychological Well-Being, Health
and Functioning of Older People in England. The Dynamics of Ageing: Evidence from the
English Longitudinal Study of Ageing 2002-10 (Wave 5), pp.98–182. Available at:
http://www.elsa-project.ac.uk/uploads/elsa/report12/ch4.pdf.
• Vázquez, C. et al., 2009. Psychological well-being and health . Contributions of positive
psychology. Annuary of Clinical and Health Psychology, 5, pp.15–27.
• Zaidi, A., 2008. Well-being of older people in ageing societies. Available at:
http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/347028/.