Chapter 18 - Quality of Life and Affect in Later Life

Abstract

This chapter addresses the research literature on psychological well-being, quality of life (QOL), and affect, as they apply to older people and suggests a new way of accounting for their interrelationships. The literature on affect experience examines the relation to Helson's adaptation level (AL) theory. QOL is asserted to represent a subjective processing of the overall duration and intensity of affect states over a self-chosen period of time augmented by stable personality characteristics and cognitive affective schemata built up over variable periods of time. The person tends to select the reference time period in such a way as to optimize the excess of positive over negative affect. The connection between events and QOL is clearly mediated by affect and the hedonic integral of these states. Events may be protracted in time, as in the case where the event of residential location in turn creates, or allows the person to form, an ongoing set of new daily events. In contexts that are ongoing and relatively stable, the person's familiarity and sense of personal competence in living in that context contribute to the mild sense of positive affect (PA) that constitutes most people's baseline level of QOL. Intrusions of negative events are more likely as personal competence decreases and as contexts become imposed rather than chosen. Internally focused affect management processes, such as adaptation and cognitive control come into play at that point. Thus, the continuing motivation to remain proactive, together with the use of reactive affect management mechanisms, accounts for the surplus of PA over negative affect (NA) states.