Positive Aging Attitudes and Social Adaptation Among Chinese Older Adults: Sequential Roles of Social Support and Life Satisfaction

Successful aging involves not only health maintenance but also continued social functioning and adaptation. Global demographic aging requires a better understanding of the psychosocial pathways through which older adults achieve successful adaptation, especially within culturally specific contexts. Positive aging attitudes are consistently associated with enhanced adaptation outcomes across diverse populations, yet the pathways through which these cognitive-emotional orientations relate to behavioral adaptation remain underexplored. This cross-sectional study used latent-variable structural equation modeling (SEM) to test a sequential mediation model among 1,016 Chinese older adults across six provinces. Validated instruments assessed aging attitudes, social support, life satisfaction, and social adaptation. Bootstrap mediation analysis with bias-corrected confidence intervals (5,000 resamples) was conducted. Results showed that positive aging attitudes were positively associated with social adaptation both directly and indirectly through social support and life satisfaction. Social support served as the primary mediator (33.33% of the total association), followed by life satisfaction (14.03%) and a sequential pathway through both mediators (10.53%). The stronger mediating role of social support relative to life satisfaction is consistent with the emphasis on relational interdependence in Chinese collectivistic culture. These findings suggest that interventions aimed at improving social adaptation among Chinese older adults may benefit from jointly targeting aging attitudes, social support networks, and subjective well-being in a sequenced manner. The results support the value of integrating socioemotional selectivity theory and the convoy model in research on aging in China, while highlighting social support as a particularly salient correlate of adaptation in later life.