No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
From an existential-humanistic perspective: examining factors contributing to purpose in life among artistically inclined individuals from middle to later life
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 June 2023
Abstract
Purpose in life has been found to decline from middle to later life in several ageing studies. Because the decline has negative impacts on health-related outcomes, it is important to identify factors contributing to purpose in life to enhance wellbeing among the ageing population. This study first examined the role of subjective social economic status (SSES) in the relationship between age and purpose in life. Subsequent analyses estimated whether the construct Artistic Creativity as a Source for Meaning in Life (ACASMIL) played a role in cultivating purpose in life among ageing individuals. Moreover, the analyses determined whether this effect was strengthened by creative self-concept (i.e. self-conviction about personal identity and self-efficacy in the global domain of creativity). Results from a sample of 224 individuals from middle to third age (mean age = 54.08, standard deviation = 10.08, range = 40–84) revealed that the relationship between age and purpose in life was only positive among those with relatively high SSES, controlling for gender and country of residence. Controlling for gender, country of residence, age and SSES, it was found that ACASMIL did not play a mediator role. Moreover, creative self-concept played a moderator role in the relationship between artistic creativity and ACASMIL. However, this moderation effect of creative self-concept was negative. Implications and suggestions for future directions are discussed.
Keywords
- Type
- Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
Adler, N and Stewart, J (2007) The MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status. MacArthur Research Network on SES & Health. Available at http://www.macsesucsf.edu/Research/Psychosocial/subjective.php.Google Scholar
Adler, NE, Epel, ES, Castellazzo, G and Ickovics, JR (2000) Relationship of subjective and objective social status with psychological and physiological functioning: preliminary data in healthy, White women. Health Psychology 19, 586–592.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Alimujiang, A, Wiensch, A, Boss, J, Fleischer, NL, Mondul, AM, McLean, K, Mukherjee, B and Pearce, CL (2019) Association between life purpose and mortality among US adults older than 50 years. JAMA Network Open 2, e194270.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Baltes, PB, Lindenberger, U and Staudinger, UM (1998) Life-span theory in developmental psychology. In Damon, W and Lerner, RM (eds), Handbook of Child Psychology: Theoretical Models of Human Development. New York: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 1029–1143.Google Scholar
Beghetto, RA and Karwowski, M (2017) Toward untangling creative self-beliefs. In Karwowski, M and Kaufman, J (eds). The Creative Self. Academic Press, pp. 3–22. doi: 10.1016/B978-0-12-809790-8.00001-7.Google Scholar
Burrow, AL, Sumner, R and Ong, AD (2014) Perceived change in life satisfaction and daily negative affect: the moderating role of purpose in life. Journal of Happiness Studies 15, 579–592.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campbell, WK and Buffardi, LE (2008) The lure of the noisy ego: narcissism as a social trap. In Wayment, HA and Bauer, JJ (eds), Transcending Self-interest: Psychological Explorations of the Quiet Ego. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, pp. 23–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, R, Bavishi, C and Rozanski, A (2016) Purpose in life and its relationship to all-cause mortality and cardiovascular events: a meta-analysis. Psychosomatic Medicine 78, 122–133.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Csikszentmihalyi, M (2015) The Systems Model of Creativity: The Collected Works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer.Google Scholar
Csikszentmihalyi, M and Getzels, JW (1970) Concern for discovery: an attitudinal component of creative production. Journal of Personality 38, 91–105.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Czekierda, K, Banik, A, Park, CL and Luszczynska, A (2017) Meaning in life and physical health: systematic review and meta-analysis. Health Psychology Review 11, 387–418.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dannefer, D (2003) Cumulative advantage/disadvantage and the life course: cross-fertilizing age and social science theory. Journals of Gerontology: Series B 58, S327–S337.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Danto, AC ([1997] 2014) After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Disabato, DJ, Goodman, FR, Kashdan, TB, Short, JL and Jarden, A (2016) Different types of well-being? A cross-cultural examination of hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. Psychological Assessment 28, 471–482.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Eliot, G (1904) Poems, Essays, and Leaves from a Note Book. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co.Google Scholar
Erikson, EH, Erikson, JM and Kivnick, HQ ([1986] 1994) Vital Involvement in Old Age. New York: WW Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Feist, GJ (1998) A meta-analysis of personality in scientific and artistic creativity. Personality and Social Psychology Review 2, 290–309.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Feist, GJ (2019) Creativity and the Big Two model of personality: plasticity and stability. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 27, 31–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, JJ ([1979] 2014) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. New York: Psychology Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Glasman, LR and Albarracín, D (2006) Forming attitudes that predict future behavior: a meta-analysis of the attitude–behavior relation. Psychological Bulletin 132, 778–822.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Goldman, N, Cornman, JC and Chang, MC (2006) Measuring subjective social status: a case study of older Taiwanese. Journal of Cross-cultural Gerontology 21, 71–89.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Harmon-Jones, E, Armstrong, J and Olson, JM (2018) The influence of behavior on attitudes. In Harmon-Jones, E, Armstrong, J and Olson, J (eds). The Handbook of Attitudes. New York: Routledge, pp. 404–449.Google Scholar
Hayes, AF (2018) Introduction to Mediation, Moderation, and Conditional Process Analysis: A Regression-based Approach. New York: Guilford Publications.Google Scholar
Hayes, AF and Cai, L (2007) Using heteroskedasticity-consistent standard error estimators in OLS regression: an introduction and software implementation. Behavior Research Methods 39, 709–722.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hill, PL and Turiano, NA (2014) Purpose in life as a predictor of mortality across adulthood. Psychological Science 25, 1482–1486.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hill, PL and Weston, SJ (2019) Evaluating eight-year trajectories for sense of purpose in the Health and Retirement Study. Aging & Mental Health 23, 233–237.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ivcevic, Z and Brackett, MA (2015) Predicting creativity: interactive effects of openness to experience and emotion regulation ability. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 9, 480–487.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jordan, CH and Zeigler-Hill, V (2013) Fragile self-esteem: the perils and pitfalls of (some) high self-esteem. In Zeigler-Hill, V (ed). Self-esteem. New York: Psychology Press, pp. 80–98.Google Scholar
Karwowski, M (2012) Did curiosity kill the cat? Relationship between trait curiosity, creative self-efficacy and creative personal identity. Europe's Journal of Psychology 8, 547–558.Google Scholar
Karwowski, M (2015) Development of the creative self-concept. Creativity: Theories – Research – Applications 2, 125–140.Google Scholar
Karwowski, M and Lebuda, I (2017) Creative self-concept: a surface characteristic of creative personality. In Feist, GJ, Reiter-Palmon, R and Kaufman, JC (eds), The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity and Personality Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 84–101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaufman, JC (2006) Self-reported differences in creativity by ethnicity and gender. Applied Cognitive Psychology 20, 1065–1082.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaufman, JC (2018) Finding meaning with creativity in the past, present and future. Perspectives on Psychological Science 13, 734–749.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kaufman, JC and Beghetto, RA (2009) Beyond big and little: the four c model of creativity. Review of General Psychology 13, 1–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kim, ES, Sun, JK, Park, N, Kubzansky, LD and Peterson, C (2013) Purpose in life and reduced risk of myocardial infarction among older U.S. adults with coronary heart disease: a two-year follow-up. Journal of Behavioral Medicine 36, 124–133.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kim, ES, Hershner, SD and Strecher, VJ (2015) Purpose in life and incidence of sleep disturbances. Journal of Behavioral Medicine 38, 590–597.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ko, H-J, Hooker, K, Geldhof, GJ and McAdams, DP (2016) Longitudinal purpose in life trajectories: examining predictors in late midlife. Psychology and Ageing 31, 693–698.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lewis, NA (2020) Purpose in life as a guiding framework for goal engagement and motivation. Social and Personality Psychology Compass 14, 1–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, NA and Hill, PL (2020) Does being active mean being purposeful in older adulthood? Examining the moderating role of retirement. Psychology and Ageing 35, 1050–1057.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lewis, NA and Hill, PL (2021) Sense of purpose promotes resilience to cognitive deficits attributable to depressive symptoms. Frontiers in Psychology 12, 2517.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Loevinger, J (1976) Ego Development: Conceptions and Theories. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.Google Scholar
Lunke, K and Meier, B (2016) Disentangling the impact of artistic creativity on creative thinking, working memory, attention, and intelligence: evidence for domain-specific relationships with a new self-report questionnaire. Frontiers in Psychology 7, 1089.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Martela, F and Steger, MF (2016) The three meanings of meaning in life: distinguishing coherence, purpose, and significance. Journal of Positive Psychology 11, 531–545.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meléndez, JC, Satorres, E, Cujiño, M-A and Reyes, M-F (2019) Big Five and psychological and subjective well-being in Colombian older adults. Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics 82, 88–93.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nusbaum, EC and Silvia, PJ (2011) Shivers and timbres: personality and the experience of chills from music. Social Psychological and Personality Science 2, 199–204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Park, CL (2017) Meaning making and resilience. In Kumar, U (ed). The Routledge International Handbook of Psychosocial Resilience. New York: Routledge, pp. 162–172.Google Scholar
Pinquart, M (2002) Creating and maintaining purpose in life in old age: a meta-analysis. Ageing International 27, 90–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reker, GT (1995) Creative ageing: the power of years. In Novak, M (ed). Ageing & Society: A Canadian Reader. Nelson, Canada: International Thomson Pub. Co, pp. 104–109.Google Scholar
Reker, GT, Peacock, EJ and Wong, PT (1987) Meaning and purpose in life and well-being: a life-span perspective. Journal of Gerontology 42, 44–49.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Richards, R (2010) Everyday creativity: process and way of life – four key issues. In Kaufman, JC and Sternberg, RJ (eds), The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 189–215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosch, E (2001) ‘If you depict a bird, give it space to fly’: Eastern psychologies, the arts, and self-knowledge. SubStance 30, 236–253.Google Scholar
Ryan, RM and Brown, KW (2003) Why we don't need self-esteem: on fundamental needs, contingent love, and mindfulness. Psychological Inquiry 14, 71–76.Google Scholar
Ryff, CD (2014) Psychological well-being revisited: advances in the science and practice of eudaimonia. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics 83, 10–28.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ryff, CD and Keyes, CLM (1995) The structure of psychological well-being revisited. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69, 719–727.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ryff, CD and Singer, B (1998) The contours of positive human health. Psychological Inquiry 9, 1–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ryff, CD and Singer, B (2003) Ironies of the human condition: well-being and health on the way to mortality. In Aspinwall, LG and Staudinger, UM (eds), A Psychology of Human Strengths: Fundamental Questions and Future Directions for a Positive Psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, pp. 271–287.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ryff, CD, Almeida, DM, Ayanian, JS, Carr, DS, Cleary, PD, Coe, C, Davidson, R, Krueger, RF, Lachman, ME, Marks, NF, Mroczek, DK, Seeman, T, Seltzer, MM, Singer, BH, Sloan, RP, Tun, PA, Weinstein, M and Williams, D (2007) National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS II), 2004–2006: Documentation of the Psychosocial Constructs and Composite Variables in MIDUS II Project 1. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research.Google Scholar
Schnell, T (2011) Individual differences in meaning-making: considering the variety of sources of meaning, their density and diversity. Personality and Individual Differences 51, 667–673.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Singh-Manoux, A, Marmot, MG and Adler, NE (2005) Does subjective social status predict health and change in health status better than objective status? Psychosomatic Medicine 67, 855–861.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Staudinger, UM, Marsiske, M and Baltes, PB (1993) Resilience and levels of reserve capacity in later adulthood: perspectives from life-span theory. Development and Psychopathology 5, 541–566.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Steger, MF, Oishi, S and Kashdan, TB (2009) Meaning in life across the life span: levels and correlates of meaning in life from emerging adulthood to older adulthood. Journal of Positive Psychology 4, 43–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, SE, Kemeny, ME, Reed, GM, Bower, JE and Gruenewald, TL (2000) Psychological resources, positive illusions, and health. American Psychologist 55, 99–109.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Windsor, TD, Curtis, RG and Luszcz, MA (2015) Sense of purpose as a psychological resource for ageing well. Developmental Psychology 51, 975–986.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
World Health Organization (2015) World Report on Ageing and Health. Geneva: World Health Organization.Google Scholar
Yalom, ID (1980) Existential Psychotherapy. The United States of America: Basic Books.Google Scholar