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 (Mage 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.