The Association Between Contentment and Depressive Symptoms: Results From Three Panel Studies
Shuo Yan, Nathaniel S. Eckland, Howard Berenbaum

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…
Genes, proteins, chemicals, diseases, species, mutations and cell lines named across the full text — each resolved to its canonical identifier and authoritative record.
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsMental Health Research Topics · Mental Health via Writing · Mental Health Treatment and Access
