Research reportThe absence of positive psychological (eudemonic) well-being as a risk factor for depression: A ten year cohort study
Section snippets
Method
We used data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Survey, a cohort survey which began in 1957 with a random sample of men and women graduating from Wisconsin high schools (Wisonsin Longitudinal Study, 2006). In 1992–1993 surviving participants were recontacted, and 6875 people completed an extensive mail questionnaire (Time 1). Ten years later, attempts were made to recontact participants. It was not possible to contact 469 participants (6.8%) primarily due to mortality (N = 406; 86.56%).
Results
Overall, 12.98% of the sample was depressed at T2. The first logistic regression predicted T2 depression from T1 overall PWB. Of people in the normal PWB tertile, 85 were depressed at T2, compared to 177 in the impaired tertile, and 466 in the low tertile. People with low PWB were 7.16 (95% CI 5.63–9.12) times more likely to be depressed (p < .001). Consistently, people with slightly impaired PWB were 2.30 (95% CI 1.75–2.99) times more likely to be depressed (p < .001). This analysis suggests that
Discussion
The results suggest that people with low levels of positive well-being are at a substantially higher risk from being depressed 10 years later. Previous work in psychiatry has focused almost exclusively on how the presence of negative well-being forms a risk factor for depression (Barnett and Gotlib, 1988, Duckworth et al., 2005). Whilst replicating these results, the current study shows that the absence of positive well-being also strongly predicts depression, even after controlling for the
Role of funding source
Nothing declared.
Conflict of interest
The authors do not have any conflicts of interest.
Acknowledgements
This research uses data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A public use file of data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study is available from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1180 Observatory Drive, Madison, Wisconsin 53706 and at http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/wlsresearch/data/. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors. We would like to thank all of the investigators, and Chris Boyce (Univ. Warwick) for
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