Acceptance: A key to wellbeing in older adults?

It is commonly found that the wellbeing of older adults worldwide is very high, in spite of declining health and other losses (Myers & Diener, 1995). It could be that wellbeing is maintained because older people accept age-related changes as normative concomitants of the ageing process. Self-acceptance is thought to be crucial for the attainment of integrity, the goal of the last stage of life in Erikson's theory of psychosocial development (1959/1980). Erikson postulated that lack of self-acceptance would be lead to despair and reduced wellbeing. The hypothesis that acceptance predicts wellbeing was tested on 840 community-dwelling adults between the ages of 72 and 105 years, a subsample of participants in the Australian Longitudinal Study of Ageing. Acceptance was operationalised by two items from the Satisfaction with Life Scale (Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985). Wellbeing was measured by scales of positive and negative affect. LISREL8 was used to test structural equation models of the relationship between acceptance and wellbeing, with self-rated health and adequacy of income included as controls. It was found that both acceptance and self-rated health were good predictors of wellbeing. However, this result is based on cross-sectional data. Further work is needed to clarify the causal relationships between acceptance and wellbeing.