An 8-month-long experimental study examined the immediate and longer term effects of regularly practicing two assigned positive activities (expressing optimism and gratitude) on well-being. More important, this intervention allowed us to explore the impact of two metafactors that are likely to influence the success of any positive activity: whether one self-selects into the study knowing that i...

In general, individuals who first received social security retired-worker benefits in June 1980-May 1981 viewed themselves as being in good health. They reported this view in response to questions in the 1982 New Beneficiary Survey conducted by the Social Security Administration. Two-thirds of the respondents in the retired-worker sample reported having no health-related work limitations and no...

Background: Environmental volunteering can increase well-being, but environmental volunteer well-being has rarely been compared to participant well-being associated with other types of volunteering or nature-based activities. This paper aims to use a multidimensional approach to well-being to explore the immediately experienced and later remembered well-being of environmental volunteers and to ...

Using two population-based surveys, we provide the first test of longitudinal age variations in Ryff's scales of psychological well-being (RPWB) across three midlife to later-life transitions. Through these analyses we explore: (a) age variation in RPWB, (b) the structure of RPWB, and (c) the potential for methodologically driven age patterns. In general, RPWB dimensions do not consistently exh...

The debate over the relationship of population and development is now more than 200 years old, starting with the treatise on population by Malthus, in 1798. The increase in population, ever since, has remained a matter of concern for economists and development planners. The most recent high point of the issue was witnessed at Cairo in September, 1994. The conference which was attended by more t...

Physical activity promotes health andwell being across the life course and is pertinent to Australia’s ageing population. However, more than half of Australian adults are insufficiently active for good health, and this proportion increases with age. Outdoor gyms have become increasingly available in Australia and internationally. Featuring equipment and designs similar to indoor gym equipment, ...

OBJECTIVE To identify barriers to fruit and vegetable intake for Indigenous Australian children and quantify factors related to these barriers, to help understand why children do not meet recommendations for fruit and vegetable intake. DESIGN We examined factors related to carer-reported barriers using multilevel Poisson models (robust variance); a key informant focus group guided our interpr...

Does the warmth of children's family environments predict the quality of their intimate relationships at the other end of the life span? Using data collected prospectively on 81 men from adolescence through the eighth and ninth decades of life, this study tested the hypotheses that warmer relationships with parents in childhood predict greater security of attachment to intimate partners in late...