[Perception of resources and their meaning for well-being: age-associated similarities and differences among young...

Personal resources represent important determinants of life-long development. Since the use of the resources is a decisive factor, the perception of resources and changes in them is presumably crucial for the developmental success. In the present study, we investigated whether the perception of resources (i. e., cognition, health, social network) differs between young and old individuals, whether the resource perception is related to well-being and whether these relations are identical among young and old adults. Young and old individuals did not differ with respect to subjective resource status and resource importance; however, the young experienced more gains and the old reported more losses. Resource status explained the highest proportion of variance in well-being in both age groups. Resource loss was of relevance to well-being only in the young, but not in the old group. Thus, the significance of resource loss seems to vary across the life span, which puts the notion of a universal role of resource loss into question. For future studies, domain-specific analyses and the investigation of protective mechanism are proposed.