Psychosocial risk factors at work in Europe: when and how age matters?

Europe is affected by an important ageing of its population, which will gain strength in upcoming decades and will also result in an “internal” ageing of the labour force. This massive structural change raises some questions about senior's emotional well-being at work and there is a growing literature on this matter. However, some studies focused only on senior workers and do not take into account the possibility that age or ageing can have a protective effect on some psychosocial risk factors or that those risks could have an age-related stability.
This study proposes to examine the effect of age on work related psychosocial risk exposure and on their outcome. The results show a clear protective effect of old age on most of the work related psychosocial risk factors and outcomes considered in this study. For most of these variables, that effect is nonlinear. Based on the life-span theory of socioemotional selectivity (completed with a collective component), the study also propose a theoretical frame which explains the nonlinear effect of age.