How spousal bereavement shapes life satisfaction: Stability and change across historical time.

Spousal bereavement is one of the most disruptive life events encountered during adulthood. However, we know little about whether and how the impacts of spousal loss on well-being have changed over the past decades. To examine such historical shifts, we applied area under the curve (AUC) metrics and latent basis growth models to multi-year within-person longitudinal change data from 2,044 participants (M age at event = 65.73 years, 70% women) obtained annually across almost four decades from the German Socio-Economic Panel (1984–2020). We found that compared to the 1980s and 1990s, those experiencing spousal loss in the 2000s and 2010s showed less severe declines in well-being between 5 years before and after the loss. This improvement was driven mostly by shallower anticipatory declines and faster recovery in the adaptation phase (both by about 0.1 SD per 10 years of historical time), rather than changes in the immediate reaction phase. We found little to no evidence that the role of socio-demographic, health, and social factors as moderators of bereavement has changed across the past 40 years. We take our findings to highlight that both historical context and individual difference factors are shaping how people experience critical life events such as bereavement. Plain language summary: The experience of losing one's spouse has presumably changed in the 21^st century alongside, for example, the increased age of widowhood and improved healthcare as well as changing nature of social resources available. But are these historical shifts accompanied by historical differences in how well-being changes with spousal bereavement? Our data from a nationally representative German sample suggest that people who lost their spouses in the 2000s and 2010s showed overall less pronounced declines in life satisfaction than those who lost their spouse in the 1980s and 1990s. In more recent decades, the surviving spouses showed fewer anticipatory declines preceding the loss and also faster recovery following the loss, but were no different in the immediate reaction phase. We found little to no evidence that the role of socio-demographic, health, and social factors as moderators of bereavement has changed across the past 40 years. Our analysis highlights the important role historical context plays in shaping individuals' functioning earound critical life events like spousal bereavement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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