Abstract
Proactive coping involves actions to prevent or alter the form of future stressors which can be important for successful aging processes, but it relies on resources. We tested internal (physical health) and external (perceptions of social status and objective socioeconomic status) resources as predictors of proactive coping. 296 adults ranging in age from 60 to 90 (M = 64.67) responded to the Mindfulness and Anticipatory Coping Everyday (MACE) survey (English et al. in Eur J Ageing, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10433-018-0475-2; Neupert and Bellingtier in Gerontologist 57(S2):S187–S192, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnx055). Older adults with higher subjective social status within their community possessed higher proactive coping skills than those with lower subjective social status. This finding was consistent across the older adult age range and was over and above the effects of objective socioeconomic status. In addition, older adults with more chronic health conditions reported less proactive coping than those with fewer health conditions. These results suggest that physical health along with the way older adults view their social status with respect to others in their community may have an impact on their ability to develop and use proactive coping.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Adler, N. E., Epel, E. S., Castellazzo, G., & Ickovics, J. R. (2000). Relationship of subjective and objective social status with psychological and physiological functioning: Preliminary data in healthy, White women. Health Psychology, 19(6), 586–592. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-6133.19.6.586
Andersson, M. A. (2015). How do we assign ourselves social status? A cross-cultural test of the cognitive averaging principle. Social Science Research, 52, 317–329. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2015.02.009
Andersson, M. A. (2018). An odd ladder to climb: Socioeconomic differences across levels of subjective social status. Social Indicators Research, 136(2), 621–643. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-017-1559-7
Aspinwall, L. G. (2011). Future-oriented thinking, proactive coping, and the management of potential threats to health and well-being. In S. Folkman (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of stress, health, and coping (pp. 334–365). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195375343.001.0001
Aspinwall, L. G., & Taylor, S. E. (1997). A stitch in time: Self-regulation and proactive coping. Psychological Bulletin, 121(3), 417–436. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.121.3.417
Ayalon, L. (2019). Subjective social status as a predictor of loneliness: The moderating effect of the type of long-term care setting. Research on Aging, 41, 915–935. https://doi.org/10.1177/0164027519871674
Baltes, P. B., & Baltes, M. M. (Eds.). (1990). Successful aging: Perspectives from the behavioral sciences. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511665684
Baltes, P. B., Staudinger, U. M., & Lindenberger, U. (1999). Lifespan psychology: Theory and application to intellectual functioning. Annual Review of Psychology, 50, 471–507. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.50.1.471
Bellingtier, J. A., & Neupert, S. D. (2018). Negative aging attitudes predict greater reactivity to daily stressors in older adults. The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 73(7), 1155–1159. https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/gbw086
Bercovitch, F. B. (1991). Social stratification, social strategies, and reproductive success in primates. Ethology and Sociobiology, 12(4), 315–333. https://doi.org/10.1016/0162-3095(91)90023-J
Bokszczanin, A. (2012). Social support provided by adolescents following a disaster and perceived social support, sense of community at school, and proactive coping. Anxiety, Stress & Coping, 25(5), 575–592. https://doi.org/10.1080/10615806.2011.622374
Braveman, P. A., Cubbin, C., Egerter, S., Chideya, S., Marchi, K. S., Metzler, M., & Posner, S. (2005). Socioeconomic status in health research: One size does not fit all. Journal of the American Medical Association, 294, 2879–2888. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.294.22.2879
Brim, O. G., Baltes, P. B., Bumpass, L. L., Clearly, P. D., Featherman, D. L., Hazzard, W. R., et al. (1996). National survey of midlife development in the United States (MIDUS), 1995–1996. Harvard Medical School, Department of Health Care Policy.
Buhrmester, M., Kwang, T., & Gosling, S. D. (2011). Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: A new source of inexpensive, yet high-quality, data? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(1), 3–5. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691610393980
Cai, Y., & Kohyama, T. (2018). Relationship between proactive coping and college graduates’ appraisal and mental health prior to organization entry. North American Journal of Psychology, 20(3), 529–544.
Chen, B., Covinsky, K. E., Stijacic Cenzer, I., Adler, N., & Williams, B. A. (2012). Subjective social status and functional decline in older adults. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 27(6), 693–699. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-011-1963-7
Corey, K. L., McCurry, M. K., Sethares, K. A., Bourbonniere, M., Hirschman, K. B., & Meghani, S. H. (2018). Utilizing Internet-based recruitment and data collection to access different age groups of former family caregivers. Applied Nursing Research, 44, 82–87. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apnr.2018.10.005
Demakakos, P., Biddulph, J. P., de Oliveira, C., Tsakos, G., & Marmot, M. G. (2018). Subjective social status and mortality: The English longitudinal study of ageing. European Journal of Epidemiology, 33, 729–739. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10654-018-0410-z
DeNavas-Walt, C., & Proctor, B. D. (2014). Income and poverty in the United States: 2014. Retrieved from https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/visualizations/p60/252/figure7.pdf
Diaz, O. V., Guendelman, S., & Kuppermann, M. (2014). Subjective social status and depression symptoms: A prospective study of women with noncancerous pelvic problems. Women’s Health Issues, 24(6), 649–655. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.whi.2014.07.003
English, A. N., Bellingtier, J. A., & Neupert, S. D. (2019). It’s “the Joneses”: The influence of objective and subjective socioeconomic status on subjective perceptions of aging. European Journal of Ageing. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10433-018-0475-2
Ghaed, S. G., & Gallo, L. C. (2007). Subjective social status, objective socioeconomic status, and cardiovascular risk in women. Health Psychology, 26(6), 668. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-6133.26.6.668
Graham, J. E., Christian, L. M., & Kiecolt-Glaser, J. K. (2006). Stress, age, and immune function: Toward a lifespan approach. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 29(4), 389–400. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10865-006-9057-4
Greenglass, E. R., & Fiksenbaum, L. (2009). Proactive coping, positive affect, and well-being: Testing for mediation using path analysis. European Psychologist, 14(1), 29–39. https://doi.org/10.1027/1016-9040.14.1.29
Greenglass, E. R., Schwarzer, R., Jakubiec, D., Fiksenbaum, L., & Taubert, S. (1999). The Proactive Coping Inventory (PCI): A multidimensional research instrument. In 20th international conference of the stress and anxiety research society (STAR), Cracow, July 1999, 12–14.
Grzywacz, J. G., Almeida, D. M., Neupert, S. D., & Ettner, S. L. (2004). Socioeconomic status and health: A micro-level analysis of exposure and vulnerability to daily stressors. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 45(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1177/002214650404500101
Hess, T. M. (2014). Selective engagement of cognitive resources: Motivational influences on older adults’ cognitive functioning. Perspectives on Psychological Sciences, 9, 388–407. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691614527465
Hess, T. M., Emery, L., & Neupert, S. D. (2012). Longitudinal relationships between resources, motivation, and functioning. The Journals of Gerontology Series b: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 67B, 299–308. https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/gbr100
Hobfoll, S. E. (1989). Conservation of resources: A new attempt at conceptualizing stress. American Psychologist, 44(3), 513.
Kahana, E., & Kahana, B. (1996). Conceptual and empirical advances in understanding aging well through proactive adaptation. In V. L. Bengtson (Ed.), Adulthood and aging: Research on continuities and discontinuities (pp. 18–40). Springer Publishing Company.
Kahana, E., & Kahana, B. (2001). Successful aging among people with HIV/AIDS. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 54(12), S53–S56. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0895-4356(01)00447-4
Kahana, E., Kahana, B., & Kercher, K. (2003). Emerging lifestyles and proactive options for successful ageing. Ageing International, 28(2), 155–180.
Kahana, E., Kelley-Moore, J., & Kahana, B. (2012). Proactive aging: A longitudinal study of stress, resources, agency, and well-being in late life. Aging & Mental Health, 16(4), 438–451. https://doi.org/10.1080/13607863.2011.644519
Kiecolt-Glaser, J. K., & Glaser, R. (2001). Stress and immunity: Age enhances the risks. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 10, 18–21.
Kopp, M., Skrabski, Á., Réthelyi, J., Kawachi, I., & Adler, N. E. (2004). Self-rated health, subjective social status, and middle-aged mortality in a changing society. Behavioral Medicine, 30(2), 65–72. https://doi.org/10.3200/BMED.30.2.65-72
Lupien, S. J., Fiocco, A., Wan, N., Maheu, F., Lord, C., Schramek, T., & Tu, M. T. (2005). Stress hormones and human memory function across the lifespan. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 30, 225–242. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2004.08.003
Martin, M., & Westerhof, G. J. (2003). Do you need to have them or should you believe you have them? Resources, their appraisal, and well-being in adulthood. Journal of Adult Development, 10, 99–112. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022439915499
Munuera, J., Rigotti, M., & Salzman, C. D. (2018). Shared neural coding for social hierarchy and reward value in primate amygdala. Nature Neuroscience, 21(3), 415–423.
Neupert, S. D., & Bellingtier, J. A. (2017). Aging attitudes and daily awareness of age-related change interact to predict negative affect. The Gerontologist, 57(S2), S187–S192. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnx055
Pearlin, L. I., Menaghan, E. G., Lieberman, M. A., & Mullan, J. T. (1981). The stress process. Journal of Health and Social Behavior. https://doi.org/10.2307/2136676
Rowe, J. W., & Kahn, R. L. (1997). Successful aging. The Gerontologist, 37(4), 433–440. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/37.4.433
Sapolsky, R. M. (2005). The influence of social hierarchy on primate health. Science, 308, 648–652. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1106477
Schulz, R., & Heckhausen, J. (1996). A life span model of successful aging. American Psychologist, 51(7), 702.
Schwarzer, R., & Taubert, S. (2002). Tenacious goal pursuits and striving toward personal growth: Proactive coping. In E. Frydenberg (Ed.), Beyond coping: Meeting goals, visions and challenges (pp. 19–35). Oxford University Press.
Singh-Manoux, A., Marmot, M. G., & Adler, N. E. (2005). Does subjective social status predict health and change in health status better than objective status? Psychosomatic Medicine, 67(6), 855–861. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.psy.0000188434.52941.a0
Social Security Administration. (2016). Fast facts & figures about social security, 2016. Retrieved from https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/chartbooks/fast_facts/2016/fast_facts16.pdf
Sohl, S. J., & Moyer, A. (2009). Refining the conceptualization of a future-oriented self-regulatory behavior: Proactive coping. Personality and Individual Differences, 47(2), 139–144. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2009.02.013
Stanojević, D., Krstić, M., Jaredić, B., & Dimitrijević, B. (2014). Proactive coping as a mediator between resources and outcomes: A structural equations modeling analysis. Applied Research in Quality of Life, 9(4), 871–885. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-013-9274-2
Taylor, S. E., & Seeman, T. E. (1999). Psychosocial resources and the SES-health relationship. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 896(1), 210–225.
Van Regenmortel, S., De Donder, L., Smetcoren, A. S., Lambotte, D., De Witte, N., & Verté, D. (2018). Accumulation of disadvantages: Prevalence and categories of old-age social exclusion in Belgium. Social Indicators Research, 140(3), 1173–1194.
Wolff, L. S., Subramanian, S. V., Acevedo-Garcia, D., Weber, D., & Kawachi, I. (2010). Compared to whom? Subjective social status, self-rated health, and referent group sensitivity in a diverse US sample. Social Science and Medicine, 70, 2019–2028. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2010.02.033
Funding
This study was funded by a Scholarship and Research Award from the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at North Carolina State University to Shevaun D. Neupert.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Ethical Approval
All procedures were approved by the NC State University IRB (protocol # 6517).
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Archibald, J.L., Neupert, S.D. “Keeping Up with the Joneses”: Subjective Social Status Predicts Proactive Coping. J Adult Dev 29, 171–178 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10804-022-09392-w
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10804-022-09392-w