Volume 37 / Number 3 / 2016

Volume 37 / Number 3 / 2016

Journal of

Individual Differences Journal of Individual Differences

jid_55-0-41-3_58-60_positiv.indd 1,3

Editor-in-Chief André Beauducel Associate Editors Philip J. Corr Sam Gosling Jürgen Hennig Philipp Y. Herzberg Aljoscha Neubauer Thomas Rammsayer Willibald Ruch Stefan Schmukle Astrid Schütz Andrzej Sekowski Jutta Stahl Martin Vocarek

19.08.2016 11:46:00

Contents Original Articles

Global Life Satisfaction in Adolescence: The Role of Personality Traits, Self-Esteem, and Self-Efficacy Jenny Marcionetti and Jeroˆme Rossier

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Agreeableness, Conflict Resolution Tactics, and School Behavior in Second Graders Daniel L. Gadke, Rene´e M. Tobin, and W. Joel Schneider

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Emotional Intelligence Training in Team Sports: The Influence of a Season Long Intervention Program on Trait Emotional Intelligence Mickae¨l Campo, Sylvain Laborde, and Emma Mosley

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Self-Perceived Competence and Test Anxiety: The Role of Academic Self-Concept and Self-Efficacy Diana Raufelder and Tobias Ringeisen

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Age and Sex Differences in Temperament and Character Dimensions in a French Nonclinical Population Benjamin Calvet, Marion Pe´ricaud, Matthieu Parneix, Adrien Jouette, Magali Bricaud, and Jean-Pierre Cle´ment

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Emotional Variability Predicts Tiredness in Daily Life: An Experience Sampling Study Aire Mill, Anu Realo, and Ju¨ri Allik

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Spatial Visualization Ability Mediates the Male Advantage in Spatial and Visual Episodic Memory Karen L. Siedlecki

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No Benefit in Seeing a Dark Future? On Recent Findings on the Effects of Forecasting Life Satisfaction Bjo¨rn Christensen and So¨ren Christensen

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Commentary

On Differentiating Adaptation From Disposition Concepts: The Case of Age-Associated Dynamics of Life Satisfaction Frieder R. Lang, Denis Gerstorf, David Weiss, and Gert G. Wagner

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News and Announcements

Call for Papers: Experimental Psychology Editor-in-Chief: Christoph Stahl

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Journal of Individual Differences (2016), 37(3)

Journal of

Individual Differences Thank you for choosing to publish your article in a Hogrefe journal. We are pleased to provide this e-offprint of the final published article for your personal use, which includes sharing the e-offprint with your coauthors, with other individuals upon request for their personal use, and as part of a grant application or a thesis. If you wish to post your article to an institutional or subject-based repository, on your personal website, or within a scholarly communication network (SCN), please use either the submitted manuscript (before peer review) or the accepted manuscript (after peer review) in accordance with the publication release for your article and the document “Guidelines on sharing and use of articles in Hogrefe journals” on the journal’s web page at www.hogrefe.com/j/jid. Thank you again for publishing your work with Hogrefe.

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Commentary On Differentiating Adaptation From Disposition Concepts The Case of Age-Associated Dynamics of Life Satisfaction Frieder R. Lang,1 Denis Gerstorf,2 David Weiss,3 and Gert G. Wagner4 1

Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany

2

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

3 4

Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany

We like to begin our comment by pointing to the fact that Christensen and Christensen (2016) successfully reproduced our findings as reported in Lang et al. (2013). This is nothing but trivial and points to the reliability of our research findings. We are thankful for this. In their work, however, Christensen and Christensen mix up the terms of optimism and pessimism as personality disposition (i.e., “attitude towards life,” p. 2) with our definition of underestimation of one’s actual future life satisfaction as a potentially adaptive mechanism related to defensive pessimism (Norem & Cantor, 1986). We also caution that Christensen and Christensen take self-evaluative subjective health as representing valid indicators of objective physical health. Consequently, their findings may or may not be relevant for the findings reported in our article. In our research, we investigated age-associated change, predictors, and possible outcomes of individual differences in the capacity to accurately anticipate one’s personal future. The rationale and scope of our research was driven by theoretical considerations rooted in lifespan theories of developmental regulation. Our research did not address dispositional optimism or pessimism (Peterson, 2000; Scheier & Carver, 1987). In our research, we took benefit from a unique setup in the longitudinal data of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP; Wagner, Frick, & Schupp, 2007), in which participants rated their current life satisfaction in the present (starting year) and, also reported how they anticipated their future life satisfaction in 5 years (target year). In this unique setup, these assessments were repeated for six consecutive five-year intervals over the course of 11 years. The SOEP does not include an objective

Journal of Individual Differences (2016), 37(3), 206–210 DOI: 10.1027/1614-0001/a000205

measure of actual physical health at the measurement occasions that we investigated (i.e., before the year of 2002). In detail, we explored three interrelated research questions in a lifespan perspective to adaptation in old age: A first research question was based on well-known and robust findings that there is not much long-term change of life satisfaction from early adulthood to old age. In this literature, it is debated whether or not relatively high levels of life satisfaction in old age reflect a paradox or rather reflect adaptation to loss (Schilling, 2006; Staudinger, 2000). For example, a possible psychological mechanism is that in old age individuals align their future expectations with what is possible in real life. In general, we observed that older adults, on average, expressed relatively high satisfaction with their current life and often reported to be more satisfied than they had expected 5 years before. There was no indication of excessive mortality of participants in the longitudinal study that could have explained such robustness of life satisfaction (i.e., people with low satisfaction dropping out prematurely). A second research question of our article aimed at ageassociated changes in the accuracy of future anticipations across adulthood. Do individuals actually become more accurate with age? A critical finding of our work is that young adults were likely to overestimate their future satisfaction, while middle-aged adults often displayed accurate anticipations, and older adults were likely to underestimate their future satisfaction. We observed that older adults underestimated their actual future life satisfaction repeatedly and consistently over a time period of 11 years, irrespective of changes in subjective self-ratings of health. To say

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it clearly: the underestimation of anticipated future life satisfaction did not change over time across six measurement occasions, and this finding is not contested. This implies that even if older people experienced a change in self-rated health, the underestimated or accurate anticipations of the future proved robust over time. We believe that this finding ought to be kept in mind when interpreting the three-partite and certainly interconnected findings of our research. Finally, a third research question that we addressed in our article was whether there is a potential risk or benefit when underestimating one’s future life satisfaction with regard to disability and mortality. We expected that preparedness of possible future losses contribute to better coping with adversity. This assumption is based on empirical results relating to the functionality of adapting one’s expectations (Cheng et al., 2009; Oettingen, Mayer, & Portnow, 2016). Our findings build on this literature by focusing on the functional role of an underestimation of one’s future life satisfaction. We acknowledge that the underlying mechanisms of our finding are not well understood. Consequently, we applaud Christensen and Christensen for having pointed to a possible contributing factor, namely changes in self-rated health. However, there is a need to consider the meaning of selfratings of perceived health, and the wealth of empirical evidence showing that in old age the actual physical health status is far from being identifiable with self-ratings of health (Baltes & Smith, 2003). Christensen and Christensen propose a causal role of change in subjective health as a confounding factor in determining accuracy of anticipated life satisfaction and mortality. This assumption is problematic because subjective health is conceptually, methodologically, and empirically related to the accuracy of anticipated life satisfaction. Based on such description of our research, we turn to discussing the implications of the reanalyses and reinterpretation of our work in Christensen and Christensen (2016). We structure our comments around three points: 1. A cautionary note on the interpretation of possible confounding effects; 2. The need for conceptual precision; and 3. Potentially spurious effects emerging from the collinearity of predictors that are based on selfevaluation.

Confounding Variables May or May not Explain Underlying Processes Getting older is about changing dynamics in the gain-loss ratio across adulthood (Baltes & Smith, 2003). Loss in Ó 2016 Hogrefe Publishing

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one domain of self-evaluation such as an individual’s satisfaction with life may or may not be a consequence of self-evaluation of losses in other domains such as social relationships, health, or finances. A central tenet of lifespan scholars in psychology pertains to the potential mechanisms of change processes. Take, for example, the role of chronological age in health dynamics: A common finding is that older adults feel less healthy than young adults. Also there is reason to believe that age differences in self-rated health are a consequence of declines in objective health. Imagine a possible finding that – after controlling for self-rated health – there is no age difference left in a measure of objective health (e.g., medical diagnosis). Would it be correct to say that there is no age difference in objective health? The answer is No. Rather it is likely that self-ratings of health may (or may not) mediate age effects on objective health. When seeking to disentangle confounding and mediating variables, there are some prerequisites and presuppositions that need to be fulfilled. For example, Fiedler, Schott, and Meiser (2011) showed in a comprehensive review and convincing simulation study some of the misleading interpretations that may result from analyses dealing simultaneously with confounding and mediating effects. Similarly, lifespan scholars who are interested in age-related change are cautious when interpreting confounds of age-associated change. Often, chronological age is the best proxy variable of age-related functional loss (Baltes, Reese, & Nesselroade, 1988). Actually, health change across adulthood is a complex, multidimensional, and multifaceted phenomenon. As noted above, in our analysis we reported that anticipated future life satisfaction in 5 years was robustly and repeatedly underestimated when comparing it to actual life satisfaction in the target year. We observed this not just one time, but six times within an 11-year time interval. Christensen and Christensen do not say much on the conceptual role of self-rated health in their note. They argue that change in self-rated health may have an effect as a confounding factor on mortality risk, and should therefore be included in the target year. In fact, not surprisingly including self-rated health at the end of the time series into the regression model does the job. The authors then argue that changes in subjective health “. . . explain the correlation between seeing a dark future and the higher mortality rate” (2016, p. 7). However, to thoroughly understand the role of the suggested mediator, additional steps would have to be completed so as to, for example, preclude spurious effects related to conceptual overlap in the measurement space. To illustrate, it has repeatedly been reported that when dealing with health challenges, people are confronted with draws from the very same self-regulatory and adaptive resources as weighing how contend they are with their respective current life situation (Diener, 1984). This has to do with the fact that self-ratings of health and self-ratings Journal of Individual Differences (2016), 37(3), 206–210

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of well-being typically tap into more or less the same psychological resources and concepts. To ignore such conceptual overlap may lead to a failure to reject a false null hypothesis (Christenfeld, Sloan, Carroll, & Greenland, 2004), and it means to capitalize on chance. Actually, self-ratings of health are often even referred to as well-being, even in the medical sciences (Steptoe, Deaton, & Stone, 2015). It seems quite obvious that there is a confound of one well-being variable (self-rated health) with another well-being variable (life satisfaction) measured at the same time (in the target year).

There Is a Need of Precision When Defining Constructs in Psychological Research The scope of our article is rooted and derived from lifespan theoretical work on adaptation (e.g., Baltes & Smith, 2003), and on research on defensive pessimism in the tradition of Norem and Cantor (1986). Consequently, we investigated optimistic, accurate, or pessimistic forecasts of one’s future life satisfaction as possible adaptation processes. That is, our research addresses the role of future anticipations of life satisfaction and the role of accuracy of such anticipation therein. We observed age-related change, prediction, and outcomes of a psychological mechanism of defensive pessimism, defined as underestimating one’s future life satisfaction. We argued that defensive pessimism serves as an adaptive mechanism in the process of aging: Not more and not less. We found preliminary evidence that such defensive pessimism contributes to survival in old age. For people outside the field of psychology, it may be difficult to follow that defensive pessimism is different from lay conceptions of dispositional pessimism. There are good reasons why in psychological sciences theoretical definitions prevail over lay definition. That is why we did not refer to concepts of dispositional optimism in the tradition of work of Seligman (1998), Scheier and Carver (1987), or Peterson (2000). The scope of our work was different. Specifically, we did not argue that accuracy of future life satisfaction reflects a trait-like personality variable, rather we argued explicitly that underestimation of one’s future anticipation may or may not reflect adaptive mechanisms to age-related change. In detail, our research explored how “anticipations of future life satisfaction change over time across adulthood” (Lang et al., 2013, p. 251, l. 23 from top), and “how between-person differences in the accuracy of anticipated life satisfaction were predictive of hazard ratios for disability and mortality across 10 or more years” (Lang et al., 2013, p. 252, l. 28 from bottom).

Journal of Individual Differences (2016), 37(3), 206–210

Commentary

In Old Age, Self-Rating of Perceived Health Should not Be Mixed up With Actual or Objective Indication of Health: Why This? Christensen and Christensen speculate that individuals may have rated their health more negatively after expecting life to get worse within the next 5 years, and thus, after 5 years feeling less satisfied as compared to expectations 5 years earlier may have had a greater mortality risk. This ignores the empirical finding that self-rated health and changes in self-rated health were negatively correlated with life satisfaction and with changes in life satisfaction (see Lang et al., 2013, Table 1). Declines in self-rated health were associated with higher initial levels of current life satisfaction. Why is this? One explanation is that self-evaluation of perceived health also reflects an adaptation to functional loss in old age (see Baltes & Mayer, 1999, Figure 15.7, p. 423 for a strong illustration of this). There is robust evidence that older adults rate their subjective health in comparison to other older adults rather than to an absolute criterion of health. Specifically, subjective ratings of physical well-being are typically almost uncorrelated with medical diagnoses of physical conditions (Baker, Stabile, & Deri, 2004; Bound, 1991; for a compelling example, see Figure 1 in Baltes & Smith, 2003). Self-ratings of health thus reflect measures of satisfaction with health rather than actual health. It is problematic to equate self-evaluation of subjective health with an objective indication of health. Considering such facts, what happens when confusing a self-rating of perceived health with our definition of accuracy of anticipated future life satisfaction after 5 years? For example, the authors assume that low self-rating of subjective health in the target year reflects that there exist objective health losses in the prior 5 years. And vice versa, this necessarily implies that high self-ratings of health reflect that there are no objective health losses. An unrealistic implication is that if a person evaluated his or her health relatively low in the beginning, and relatively high in the target year, there would be an increase in current life satisfaction. As noted above, this is not the case in the data. It is more likely that there are declines in objective health in old age, related to increased disability. Consequently, in our research we decided to include a measure of functional disability and change of disability in the target year. In an additional analysis done for this commentary, we examined how often individuals above 65 years had a disability at the first measurement occasion, but not in the target year. Such sudden healing of disability, which is at the core of the argumentation of Christensen and Christensen, occurred in 1.6% of older adults, who are older than 65 years.

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However, much more often, we observed an increase of the degree of disability in 5.9% of older adults above 65 years. It is obvious that unexpected functional loss would be much more likely for people who had expected things to turn out more positive than for those who actually had expected such a decline before. Again, it is important to keep in mind that disentangling health-related changes that might be related to anticipations of life satisfaction was not the scope of our work. However, we are curious to see more research in this direction. Specifically, we would be interested in objectively measured health such as the number of medical diagnoses made by physicians based on current classification systems. In our analyses, we focused on whether older individuals were able to pursue daily routines without help. We have operationally defined this aspect as disability incidence, defined as “. . . having a reduced capacity to work or as being severely handicapped” (Lang et al., 2013, p. 253, left column, 3rd paragraph). The next steps in our endeavors are to replicate and extend our findings in independent samples and to comprehensively examine changing health at various different levels, including objective, functional, and biomarker components. Also, our findings are corroborated in recent research that included health indicators (Hamm, Kamin, Chipperfield, Perry, & Lang, 2016), and found protective health effects of negative future thinking (Oettingen et al., 2016). In their analyses as reported in Table 2, Christensen and Christensen appear to ignore the confound of self-rated health with life satisfaction when they ignore the finding that the predictive effect of disability for mortality hazards disappears in the same way as that of forecasts – but would one seriously want to argue that disability is not associated with an increased risk of mortality?

Conclusion and Outlook The issue of whether positive or negative personal outlooks into the future have impact on the course of aging has a long tradition in the psychological literature. It is well known that positive thinking (i.e., “optimism”) as a trait-like disposition does not contradict expecting things to become worse in the future. For example, Seligman (1998) argued that learned optimism also entails risks, particularly when it is unrealistic and not rooted in actual performance. Pessimistic attitudes entail risks when associated with helplessness and with depression. Yet there is not much, and not enough data that serves to clarify in what ways realistic or illusionary thinking contributes to proactivity and adaptation in old age. In our research (Lang et al., 2013), we found evidence suggesting that accuracy or humble Ó 2016 Hogrefe Publishing

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realism of future anticipations of life satisfaction may contribute to healthy aging. We thank Christensen and Christensen for their meritorious attempt to add to this literature. As detailed above, however, we consider the reported reanalyses to be fragmentary, to confound adaptation efforts with stable individual difference dispositions, and to disregard possible multicollinearity among the predictors. We do not and never have argued that there is a trait-like dispositional pessimism that is associated with reduced mortality risk. Rather we have argued that more research is needed to better understand in what ways modest and humble expectations about one’s personal future well-being may provide resources for adaptation to challenges or adversity in late life. One mechanism may be that such individuals show greater flexibility with interpreting their health conditions and their life. This may be one reason why accurate and humble anticipations of one’s life satisfaction were associated with a more positive self-rating of one’s subjective health over time, and with reduced mortality.

References Baker, M., Stabile, M., & Deri, C. (2004). What do self-reported objective measures of health measure? Journal of Human Resources, 39, 1067–1093. Baltes, P. B. & Mayer, K. U. (Eds.). (1999). The Berlin Aging Study: Aging from 70 to 100. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Baltes, P. B., Reese, H. W., & Nesselroade, J. R. (1988). Life-span developmental psychology: Introduction to research methods. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Baltes, P. B., & Smith, J. (2003). New frontiers in the future of aging: From successful aging of the young old to the dilemmas of the fourth age. Gerontology, 49, 123–135. doi: 10.1159/ 000067946 Bound, J. (1991). Self-reported versus objective measures of health in retirement models. Journal of Human Resources, 26, 107–137. Cheng, S.-T., Fung, H. H., & Chan, A. C. M. (2009). Self-perception and psychological well-being: The benefits of foreseeing a dark future. Psychology and Aging, 24, 623–633. doi: 10.1037/ a0016410 Christenfeld, N., Sloan, R. P., Carroll, D., & Greenland, S. (2004). Risk factors, confounding, and the illusion of statistical control. Psychosomatic Medicine, 66, 868–875. Christensen, B., & Christensen, S. (2016). No benefits of seeing a dark future? A note on recent findings on the effects of forecasting life satisfaction. Journal of Individual Differences, 37, 201–205. doi: 10.1027/1614-0001/a000200 Diener, E. (1984). Subjective well-being. Psychological Bulletin, 95, 542–575. doi: 10.1037/0033-2909.95.3.542 Fiedler, K., Schott, M., & Meiser, T. (2011). What mediation analysis can (not) do. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47, 1231–1236. doi: 10.1016/j.jesp.2011.05.007 Hamm, J. M., Kamin, S. T., Chipperfield, J. G., Perry, R. P., & Lang, F. R. (2016, January). Overestimating future health in mid-tolate life: Consequences for 15-Year hospitalization. San Diego, CA: Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

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Lang, F. R., Weiss, D., Gerstorf, D., & Wagner, G. G. (2013). Forecasting life satisfaction across adulthood: Benefits of seeing a dark future? Psychology and Aging, 28, 249–261. doi: 10.1037/a0030797. Norem, J. K., & Cantor, N. (1986). Defensive pessimism: Harnessing anxiety and motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 1208–1217. doi: 101037/0022-3514.51. 6.1208 Oettingen, G., Mayer, D., & Portnow, S. (2016). Pleasure now, pain later: positive fantasies about the future predict symptoms depression. Psychological Science. Online first publication. doi: 10.1177/0956797615620783 Peterson, C. (2000). The future of optimism. The American Psychologist, 55, 44–55. doi: 10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.44 Seligman, M. (1998). Learned optimism. New York, NY: Pocket Books. Scheier, M. F., & Carver, C. S. (1987). Dispositional optimism and physical well-being: The influence of generalized outcome expectancies on health. Journal of Personality, 55, 169–201. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-6494.1987.tb00434.x Schilling, O. (2006). Development of life satisfaction in satisfaction in old age: Another view of the “paradox”. Social Indicators Research, 75, 241–271. doi: 10.1007/s11205-004-5297-2

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Commentary

Staudinger, U. M. (2000). Viele Gründe sprechen dagegen und trotzdem fühlen viele Menschen sich gut: Das Paradox des subjektiven Wohlbefindens [Many reasons speak against it, yet many people feel good: The paradox of subjective well-being]. Psychologische Rundschau, 51, 185–197. Steptoe, A., Deaton, A., & Stone, A. A. (2015). Subjective wellbeing, health, and ageing. The Lancet, 385, 640–648. Wagner, G. G., Frick, J. R., & Schupp, J. (2007). The German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) – Scope, Evolution and Enhancements. Schmollers Jahrbuch, 127, 139–169. Received March 12, 2015 Revision received January 14, 2016 Accepted January 20, 2016 Published online September 12, 2016 Frieder R. Lang Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg Kobergerstr. 62 90408 Nürnberg, Germany Tel. +49-911-530296100 Fax +49-911-530296101 E-mail [email protected]

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