Relationship between styles of thinking and creating well-being, perceived health and stress in older adults

Abstract The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship between thinking and creating styles, well-being, perceived health, and stress in a sample of older adults. The sample was composed of 123 individuals (98 women and 25 men), aged from 60 to 90 years (M = 68.35, SD=7.4), who answered the Thinking and Creating Scales, Positive Mental Health Scale, Perceived Stress Scale and a sociodemographic questionnaire. Spearman’s ρ analyzes and a network of regularized partial correlations were used to investigate the relationships between the variables. We concluded that the styles that most positively related to the variables of health, well-being and stress are Nonconformist-transforming and Emotional-intuitive styles. The characteristics of such styles can be encouraged to act as positive factors for quality of life at maturity.