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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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| Can the past keep life pleasant even for old-old trauma survivors? | | Author(s) | Amit Shrira, Dov Shmotkin |
| Journal title | Aging & Mental Health, vol 12, no 6, November 2008 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis, November 2008 |
| Pages | pp 807-819 |
| Source | http://www.tandfonline.com |
| Keywords | Jewish ; War ; Memory and Reminiscence ; Well being ; Israel. |
| Annotation | The relative effect of positive and negative autobiographical aspects in later life as a function of the traumatic experience of the Holocaust and age was examined. 225 Holocaust survivors were compared with 103 pre-war and 234 post-war European-descent immigrants referring to their past in biographical interviews. The participants depicted personally perceived outstanding life periods defined as anchor periods (Shmotkin, 2005, 'Happiness in face of diversity: reformulating the dynamic and modular bases of subjective well-being', Review of General Psychology, vol 9, pp 291-325). They rated their happiness and suffering during major anchor periods ("the happiest period" and "the most miserable period") as well as their life satisfaction. Even after massive trauma and under accelerating decline associated with old-old age (over 80), the past can keep life pleasant, as indicated by the stronger association of past happiness, compared to that of past suffering, with life satisfaction. Nevertheless, past suffering was associated with life satisfaction in Holocaust survivors and manifested a stronger effect among most of the old-old participants. Holocaust survivors demonstrated a greater difficulty to compensate for age-related losses, while comparison groups showed a greater optimisation of satisfaction through narrative means in old-old age. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-090402212 A |
| Classmark | TKS: VMC: DB: D:F:5HH: 7H6 |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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