Poster #44 - Age 11 positive emotions associated with multiple well-being outcomes 39 years later

• In Event: Poster Session 02

Abstract

Despite parents’ desire for their children to live long, happy lives (e.g., Diener & Lucas, 2004), children’s happiness remains an understudied area of socio-emotional development. The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions highlights ways that positive emotions have short and long-term potential for learning, growth, health, and well-being at any age (Fredrickson, 2013). Yet, research examining children's emotions typically focuses on negative emotions, uses more proximal outcomes, and relies of subjective reports. Research examining whether children’s positive emotions longitudinally predict adult well-being (e.g., life-satisfaction, meaning in life, optimism, social well-being) is rare. Linking children’s emotions to adult well-being is valuable given that adult well-being predicts health and longevity, and it can strengthen the case for socio-emotional development in education and policy. We used children’s written use of positive emotions to predict adult life satisfaction, positive emotions, optimism, meaning in life, social well-being, and physical health.

In this study (N=436), we examined the links between written positive emotion expression, indicated by use of positive emotion words in an essay, in childhood (age 11)—independent of academic ability and socioeconomic status (SES)—and multiple well-being indicators at age 50 in a representative sample of the United Kingdom from the National Child Development Study. At age 11, participants were prompted to write about what they thought their life would be like at age 25. We 4 trained coders (adapted from Danner et al., 2001) to identify positive emotion word use in each essay (intraclass reliability ranged from .81 to .95, ps < .001). Essay emotion word scores were divided by number of words in the essay to get a proportion.

Using structural equation modeling to account for age 11 SES and academic ability, we found that age 11 positive emotion expression significantly predicted age 50 life satisfaction (β=.08, p=.034), meaning in life (β=.11, p=.008), optimism (β=.10, p=.007), and social well-being (β=.11, p=.009), but not physical health or positive emotions (see Figure 1; model fit was good, CFI=.99, TLI=.96, RMSEA=.05, 90% CI=.02 to .07, χ2 [16]=31.48, p=.012). Further, effects of positive emotion expression at age 11 were independent of age 11 SES and academic ability.

In this study, participants who expressed more positive emotions in their essays at age 11 reported greater life satisfaction, meaning in life, optimism, and social well-being at age 50. Consistent with other research (e.g., Jewell & Kambhampati, 2015), age 11 positive emotion expression was not associated with concurrent SES. The findings of this study are strengthened by the use of an observational indicator of emotion expression via writing. Notably, effect sizes were unsurprisingly small across this time given the developmental changes that occur between age 11 and age 50. To better understand our findings, future research could investigate how the benefits of children’s happiness unfold over shorter intervals of time and look for factors that predict childhood happiness. Elevating understanding of children’s happiness gives policymakers and educators additional justifications for activities (e.g., art, music, recess) that cultivate positive emotion and may thus promote positive socio-emotional development.

Authors

• John K. Coffey, Arizona State University
  Presenting Author

• Katherine Nelson-Coffey, The University of the South

• Michael Pluess, Queen Mary University of London