Positive life experiences and mortality: Examination of psychobiological pathways.

INTRODUCTION AND RATIONALE: Positive life experiences are potentially-rewarding events and behaviors, such as social and romantic interactions, experiences of relaxation and physical comfort, time spent in nature, and other leisure activities. To date, there is limited evidence linking positive life experiences to long-term health outcomes. OBJECTIVE AND METHODS: The current study used data from N = 1243 participants in the Midlife Development in the US Study Biomarker Project to examine whether greater frequency of a range of different positive experiences and greater level of enjoyment of these experiences was linked to survival over a 12- to-16-year period in Cox proportional hazards models. The potential mediating roles of positive affect, depression, perceived stress, and an allostatic load index of physiological dysregulation in these associations were also examined. RESULTS: Greater frequency of positive experiences and greater enjoyment of positive experiences were both associated with a reduced hazard of mortality over the 12- to 16-year period. Models assessing a single mediator showed that both associations were mediated by decreased depression and decreased perceived stress, but not by positive affect or allostatic load. In supplementary multi-mediation models, depression was the only significant mediator of the frequency-survival and enjoyment-survival associations. CONCLUSIONS: Positive life experiences may confer long-term survival benefits, partially through lessening depressive symptomatology.

Socioeconomic status, positive experiences, and allostatic load.

OBJECTIVE: Socioeconomic disparities in physiological well-being may be a pathway to the poorer health outcomes observed in those of lower socioeconomic status (SES). The present research examined greater frequency of positive life experiences (POS) as a route through which greater cumulative SES (CSES) may be linked to lower allostatic load (AL), a multisystem index of physiological dysregulation, and assessed whether the association between POS and AL varies along the socioeconomic spectrum. METHOD: These associations were examined using data from the Midlife Development in the United States Biomarker Project (N = 2,096). Analyses included tests of whether positive experiences mediated the CSES-AL association, whether CSES moderated associations of positive experiences and AL, and whether CSES moderated positive experience mediation of the CSES-AL association (moderated mediation). RESULTS: The observed association between CSES and AL was weakly mediated by POS. CSES moderated the POS-AL association, such that POS was associated with AL only at lower levels of CSES. The moderated mediation analysis showed that POS mediated the association between CSES and AL only at lower levels of CSES. CONCLUSIONS: The results suggest complexity in associations between cumulative socioeconomic advantage, positive life events, and physiological well-being. Positive life events may play a stronger role in physiological health in those of lower socioeconomic advantage, as one of multiple pathways through which lower SES is linked to poor health. Given the modifiability of access to, and frequency of, positive life events, the potential role of positive experiences in lessening health disparities warrants further study. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).