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Edited by Eileen M. Crimmins, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, and approved March 9, 2017 (received for review September 26, 2016)
Significance
Life skills such as persistence, conscientiousness, and control are important in early life. Our findings suggest that they are relevant in later life as well. Higher scores on five life skills (conscientiousness, emotional stability, determination, control, and optimism) were associated both cross-sectionally and longitudinally with economic success, social and subjective wellbeing, and better health in older adults. No single attribute was especially important; rather, effects depended on the accumulation of life skills. Our results suggest that fostering and maintaining these skills in adult life may be relevant to health and wellbeing at older ages.
Abstract
Life skills play a key role in promoting educational and occupational success in early life, but their relevance at older ages is uncertain. Here we measured five life skills—conscientiousness, emotional stability, determination, control, and optimism—in 8,119 men and women aged 52 and older (mean 66.7 y). We show that the number of skills is associated with wealth, income, subjective wellbeing, less depression, low social isolation and loneliness, more close relationships, better self-rated health, fewer chronic diseases and impaired activities of daily living, faster walking speed, and favorable objective biomarkers (concentration of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, vitamin D and C-reactive protein, and less central obesity). Life skills also predicted sustained psychological wellbeing, less loneliness, and a lower incidence of new chronic disease and physical impairment over a 4-y period. These analyses took account of age, sex, parental socioeconomic background, education, and cognitive function. No single life skill was responsible for the associations we observed, nor were they driven by factors such as socioeconomic status or health. Despite the vicissitudes of later life, life skills impact a range of outcomes, and the maintenance of these attributes may benefit the older population.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: a.steptoe{at}ucl.ac.uk.
↵2Deceased October 20, 2015.
Author contributions: A.S. and J.W. designed research; A.S. and J.W. performed research; A.S. analyzed data; and A.S. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
Data deposition: The data reported in this paper have been deposited with the UK Data Service, https://www.ukdataservice.ac.uk/ (accession no. GN33368).
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1616011114/-/DCSupplemental.
Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.
Life skills and wellbeing
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