Investigating the bidirectional association between executive functions and well-being in middle-aged and older adults: a cross-lagged modeling approach

The direction of the relationship between executive functions (EF) and well-being in terms of healthy aging is poorly understood. Further, notwithstanding theoretical differences regarding the multidimensional nature of well-being, few studies have thoroughly clarified the empirical distinctions between hedonic (i.e., happiness through pleasure and life satisfaction) and eudaimonic (i.e., psychological and social) well-being. Therefore, using a large-scale longitudinal dataset, we investigated the bidirectional associations between EF and three facets of well-being (hedonic well-being, psychological well-being, and social well-being) and whether these relationships differed between middle-aged and older adults. Using autoregressive cross-lagged modeling, we found that the latent variable of EF positively predicted eudaimonic well-being for older adults 9 years later. However, we observed no such relationship for middle-aged adults. Our findings highlight the importance of considering the multifaceted construct of well-being and age-related discontinuity in the associations between EF and well-being.