Changes in Social Asymmetry as People Age and the Effects of Personality and Socioeconomic Status

TL;DR

This study explores how social vulnerability and resilience change with age and how personality traits and socioeconomic status influence these changes.

Contribution

The study introduces social asymmetry as a novel measure to understand individual differences in adapting to social environments during aging.

Findings

Social asymmetry increases in late adulthood.

Higher neuroticism is linked to greater social vulnerability.

Higher extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and SES are linked to social resilience.

Abstract

Social stress related experiences are substantial public health concerns as people age. However, prior research suggests discrepancies among different aspects of social stress such as social isolation and loneliness. Social asymmetry is a concept that captures the discordance/concordance between loneliness and social isolation levels. Social asymmetry indicates how well individuals adapt to their social environment, with individuals experiencing greater loneliness than expected given their social isolation levels considered socially vulnerable and those experiencing less loneliness than expected considered socially resilient. It remains unknown how social asymmetry changes over time as people age, and how different individual and contextual factors contribute to individual differences in the change trajectory of social asymmetry. In the current project, we used data from 9 large longitudinal studies to examine changes in social asymmetry during aging and the effects of personality traits and socioeconomic status on the levels of and changes in social asymmetry. Adopting the coordinated data analysis framework allows us to synthesize the results across samples and examine the degree to which the findings are generalizable by testing different sample-level moderators. The preliminary results suggested increases in social asymmetry in late adulthood. Higher neuroticism was found to be related to higher levels of and increases in social asymmetry (social vulnerability, whereas higher extraversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness, as well as higher SES, were related to lower levels of and decreases in social asymmetry (social resilience). The study enhances our understanding of individual differences in the dynamics of objective and subjective social stress during aging.