Childhood Roots of Women’s Subjective Well-Being The Role of Optimism Daiva Daukantaite and Lars R. Bergman Stockholm University, Sweden Abstract. The focus of the study is on the importance of early optimism for adult subjective well-being (SWB). Only females were studied. Data from age 13 and age 43 were taken from the Swedish longitudinal research program Individual Development and Adaptation (IDA, Magnusson, 1988). We investigated the longitudinal relationship between early optimism and optimism at age 43, its mediation via positive and negative affect measured at age 43, and finally the “effect” on global life satisfaction at age 43. For this purpose, structural equation methodology was used and the fit indices were compared among three extended cognitive-affective models, based on Chang’s work (Chang, 2002). The best fitting model suggests that early optimism influences optimism at middle age, which in its turn has both a direct influence on global life satisfaction and an indirect influence via the negative affect dimension. In further analyses we studied the importance of early optimism for adult SWB in relation to the importance of a number of other factors measured in adolescence. Optimism at age 13 was the only factor that was consistently related to women’s SWB at age 43. Keywords: optimism, subjective well-being, women, longitudinal, cognitive-affective model Considerable research efforts have been directed to- ward understanding factors that influence a person’s general subjective well-being (SWB). It has generally been found that personality factors are much more strongly related to SWB than other factors are. Of the personality factors, optimism has consistently been found to be one of the strongest predictors of SWB (e.g., Scheier & Carver, 1985; Carver & Scheier, 2002a; Cha, 2003). However, almost all information about the rela- tionship between optimism and SWB comes from cross-sectional studies carried out in adulthood. Our fo- cus is on the importance of optimism in adolescence for adult SWB. Does the relationship extend longitudinally so that optimism in adolescence has consequences for adult SWB? What is the importance of early optimism in relation to other adolescence factors for SWB in adulthood? We also use structural equation modeling to test three extended cognitive-affective models, based on Chang’s work (Chang, 2002), to model the longitu- dinal relationships between early optimism, optimism at age 43, its mediation via positive and negative affect measured at age 43, and finally the “effect” on global life satisfaction at age 43. Optimism and SWB Subjective well-being has been defined as an individ- ual’s evaluation of his/her life as a whole (Diener, 1984). It is often regarded as consisting of three partially sepa- rate components: Life satisfaction (a cognitive compo- nent), positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) (af- fective components). Most often personality variables, especially neuroticism, extraversion, optimism, and self esteem, are found to be highly related to the SWB com- ponents, whereas the relationships between social cir- cumstances and the components of general SWB are rather weak and the amount of explained variance tends to be small (Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith, 1999). The main focus of the present study lies on optimism and its relationships to the SWB components. The unidimensionality of optimism has been ques- tioned and the existence of two related dimensions: Op- timism and pessimism have been discussed (e.g., Mar- shall, Wortman, Kusulas, Hervig, & Vickers, 1992). We are primarily interested here in the importance of the first dimension, optimism, for SWB. There are two main approaches to the study of opti- mism. One approach was developed by Seligman and his DOI 10.1027/1016-9040.10.4.287 © 2005 Hogrefe & Huber Publishers European Psychologist 2005; Vol. 10(4):287–297