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The article focuses on the relationship between well-being and a socially-engaged lifestyle among Europeans aged 64 and above, in which topics discussed include the impact of activity participation on older people's health, and how the findings compared with data from the first Wave of the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe. Also mentioned are activities that fall under the socially and productively oriented category and the definition of well-being.

This study examines relationships among three measures of subjective well-being (life satisfaction, happiness and depressive symptoms), and two global measures of productive activity (number of activities and time commitment). We argue that participation in multiple productive activities should increase subjective well-being because these behaviors increase social integration and provide meaningful social roles. Using the first two waves of the Americans’ Changing Lives survey, we estimate a series of OLS and ordered logistic regression models to examine this issue among a sample of respondents 60 years old and older. Our multivariate regression results show that as time committed to productive activities increases, life satisfaction increases. Both increasing numbers of productive activities and increasing time commitment predict higher levels of happiness. Also, we find only modest support for a relationship between productive activities and the number of and changes in depressive symptoms. Our results provide support for the idea that engaging in productive activities is beneficial to older persons’ well-being, implying confirmation of the role enhancement hypothesis and demonstrating the importance of social integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]