Dr. Daniela Jopp of the Fordham University’s Psychology Department (above at the New York City Centenarian Reception)

 By Joanna Klimaski

Hitting 100 can come with a cost: loss of health, loss of mobility, and even loss of friends and family — all of which would seem to take any anticipation out of the alleged achievement.

But according to Daniela Jopp, Ph.D., many very old individuals say that they are, in fact, very happy.

Daniela Jopp, Ph.D., plans to compare the participants of the Fordham Centenarian Study with German and Portuguese centenarians to determine cultural aspects of successful aging.

Jopp, an assistant professor of psychology, is studying the "well-being paradox," or the conceptual incongruity between the decline that comes with old age and the actual welfare of the very old.

"It's a well-known phenomenon, but we were not aware that this would hold until the end of the life span, and until very old age," she said. "As a psychologist, I was mostly interested in the mechanisms that may be responsible for this [paradox]."

She first noticed the discrepancy during a centenarian study she was conducting at Heidelberg University in Germany, where researchers were investigating which factors might contribute to longevity. What caught Jopp's attention, though, was not the age of her subjects, but their level of contentment.

"I was very impressed by the fact that those very long-lived individuals were so happy despite the fact that they’ve gone through many things, and their lives are pretty much characterized by losses and difficulties," Jopp said.

In 2010, Jopp launched the Fordham Centenarian Study to examine the well-being paradox more closely. Her research marked a turn in longevity studies, which until then mostly analyzed genetic and lifestyle factors that contribute to reaching very old age.

Few, though, had explored whether very old individuals actually led high-quality lives at triple-digits, and if they did, how they accomplished it.

Using funding from Fordham and the Brookdale Foundation, Jopp and her team interviewed more than 100 individuals — many of them living in the Bronx [a borough of NYC]  — who were at or just below the centenarian mark (half between the ages of 95 and 99, and half over 100 years old). Though varying in race, sex, and socioeconomic backgrounds, the centenarians share four key psychological strengths, Jopp found.

The first of these is meaningfulness: each centenarian has found a sense of meaning in his or her life, though the meaning itself is unique to each individual.

"Some feel they contribute to their families or to their immediate social partners, and that's certainly one way of experiencing meaning," she said. "A lot of people just have goals and projects that they pursue, and that’s another source of meaning."