Whether and how societal contexts permeate aging experiences in microlevel, daily contexts remains underexplored. Studying groups with shared language, history, and homogeneous cultural traditions but different socialization experiences offers a unique opportunity to better understand how cultural-societal contexts permeate daily life contexts. Middle-aged and older Germans have spent considerable time living in different political and economic systems (free market democracy in West Germany vs. socialist planned economy in East Germany). Given that views of aging (VoA) and their daily fluctuations are meaningfully linked to developmental outcomes such as affective well-being, we investigated German East-West differences in the relation between VoA and affective experience using data from a 14-day diary study, with data of older East ( N = 97) and West ( N = 71) Germans (50–87 years old). East Germans reported less negative and more positive affect, more age-related gains, and a slower aging rate. Relations between age-related losses and gains with negative affect were more pronounced for West Germans. Our results indicate that growing up and living in Western, youth-oriented cultures increases the relevance of daily aging-related experiences for affective well-being.
Wirth et al. (Wed,) studied this question.
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