Milestone Age Affects the Role of Health and Emotions in Life Satisfaction: A Preliminary Inquiry
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Miron-Shatz, T
Bhargave, R
Doniger, GM
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Jill turns 40. Should this change how she evaluates her life, and would a similar change occur when she turns 41? Milestone age (e.g., 30, 40, 50)—a naturally occurring feature in personal timelines—has received much attention is popular culture, but little attention in academic inquiry. This study examines whether milestone birthdays change the way people evaluate their life. We show that life outlook is impacted by this temporal landmark, which appears to punctuate people’s mental maps of their life cycle. At these milestone junctures, people take stock of where they stand and have a more evaluative perspective towards their lives when making life satisfaction judgments. Correspondingly, they place less emphasis on daily emotional experiences. We find that milestone agers (vs. other individuals) place greater weight on health satisfaction and BMI and lesser weight on daily positive emotions in their overall life satisfaction judgments, whereas negative emotions remain influential.
Date Issued
2015-08-05
Date Acceptance
2015-06-24
Citation
PLOS One, 2015, 10 (8)
ISSN
1932-6203
Publisher
Public Library of Science
Journal / Book Title
PLOS One
Volume
10
Issue
8
Copyright Statement
© 2015 Miron-Shatz et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
License URL
Subjects
General Science & Technology
MD Multidisciplinary
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
e0133254