No Benefit in Seeing a Dark Future? On Recent Findings on the Effects of Forecasting Life Satisfaction
Artikel i vetenskaplig tidskrift, 2016

In their article, Lang, Weiss, Gerstorf, & Wagner, (2013) use the adult life span sample of the national German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) to explore functional outcomes of life satisfaction with regard to hazards of mortality. Their findings suggest that "being overly optimistic [in] predicting a better future than actually observed was associated with [...] a great risk of mortality within the following decade." In this short paper, we analyze the same data set using the same model, but, in addition to the self-rated health status in the starting year included in the model by Lang et al. (2013), we furthermore control for the self-rated health at the target year. With this modification, it turns out that the accuracy of anticipated future life satisfaction has no significant effect on mortality. Two additional analyses underpin this finding.

future anticipation

health

mortality

optimism

models

subjective well-being

pessimism

Författare

Sören Christensen

Chalmers, Matematiska vetenskaper, Matematisk statistik

Göteborgs universitet

Journal of Individual Differences

1614-0001 (ISSN)

Vol. 37 3 201-2015

Ämneskategorier

Matematik

Annan hälsovetenskap

DOI

10.1027/1614-0001/a000200

Mer information

Skapat

2017-10-07