The Impact Of Subjective Well-Being On Mortality Risk Among The Chinese Elderly

Population aging in China has been accelerating,and the proportion of elderly people over age 65 has been increasing.The number of elderly people over the age of 80 has exceeded 20 million.The rapid development of aging and the rise in foreseeable medical and health costs have caused concern for the health and longevity of older people.However,healthy longevity not only represents the integrity of the body function of the elderly and the continuity of life.High quality health and longevity are the goals pursued by mankind.Subjective well-being is an important indicator to measure the quality of life.Studying its impact on the risk of mortality is of great significance to improving the quality of life of the elderly.This study was based on a large sample(>35000)and longitudinal study(1998-2014,a total of 7)-Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey(CLHLS)data,employed the cox proportional hazards models,and explored the impacts of positive emotion,negative emotion and life satisfaction on mortality risk of mortality.Moreover,the long-term mortality study has more death information than that of the short-term death study.However,most of the previous mortality studies are short-term studies(2-3 years,2-6 issues).Therefore,long-term and short-term mortality studies were compared in the current study to examine whether the effects of subjective well-being on mortality risk were different in the short term(4 years,3 issues and 3 years,2 issues)and the long term(16 years,7 issues and 12 years,5 issues).In addition,subjective well-being is essentially a time-dependent variable,but most of the earlier studies used it as a time-independent variable,which would yield estimation errors.So the study estimated the bias when subjective well-being is misused as time-independent variables.The study found that positive emotion,negative emotion,change of life satisfaction,interaction between life satisfaction and marital status significantly affected the risk of mortality in the elderly after controlling for risk factors such as social demographic characteristics,physical health,social support,cognitive ability and social participation.The higher the positive emotion,the lower the negative emotion,remaining stable or getting better the life satisfaction,the lower the mortality risk.Having or no spouse plays a decisive role on the association of life satisfaction with the risk of mortality.The elderly with a spouse had a lower risk of mortality.The study also found that the impact of subjective well-being on the risk of mortality was significantly different between short-term and long-term studies.In long-term studies,positive emotion,negative emotion and life satisfaction significantly affected the risk of mortality of the elderly while there were no such significant relations in short-term studies.With age,positive emotions decrease,negative emotions increase,and life satisfaction is relatively stable.The model with subjective well-being as time-independent variable underestimated the impact of subjective well-being on the risk of mortality and performs worse in goodness of fit of model.This study deeply explored the strength,direction and difference of positive emotion,negative emotion,life satisfaction on mortality risk of the elderly.The differences between long-term and short-term studies on the risk of mortality among the elderly were analyzed.The bias of misusing subjective well-being as time-independent variable was estimated.This study had important implications for the policy making and the implementation of the healthy aging strategy in China.