The Association Between Contentment and Depressive Symptoms: Results From Three Panel Studies

TL;DR

This study shows that contentment is linked to fewer depressive symptoms both in individuals and over time, across three different groups.

Contribution

The study uniquely examines contentment's role in depression using three distinct datasets and RI-CLPM models.

Findings

Contentment is consistently associated with fewer depressive symptoms across all three samples.

Contentment predicts future depressive symptoms in two of the three samples.

Tranquility and cheer do not fully explain the relationship between contentment and depression.

Abstract

We examined whether contentment was associated with depressive symptoms at both between‐ and within‐person levels, both concurrently and prospectively. We examined our hypotheses using random‐intercept cross‐lagged panel models (RI‐CLPM) that computed the associations between contentment and depressive symptoms, treating tranquility and cheer as covariates, with three sets of data: three waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS; n = 27,947), the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) Refresher daily diary study (n = 782), and a daily diary study with college students (n = 278). For the between‐person and concurrent within‐person associations, in all three samples, contentment was associated with depressive symptoms, even when considering tranquility and cheer. Likewise, for the prospective associations, only contentment predicted subsequent depressive symptoms in two of the three samples (the HRS and the MIDUS samples). We discuss implications for studying the etiology and treatment of depression.