The study conducted by the University of Cambridge, Michigan State University and King’s College London used 91,267 UK participants aged 10-80 years from the Understanding Society study. The team used 9 years’ worth of data.
The research suggests that life satisfaction can decrease as young as ten years old. This information was obtained by using Understanding Society’s youth data which focuses on children aged between 10-15 years old. The authors believe this is the real strength of the research since most fail to study the whole adolescent age range.
Interestingly, the researchers found adolescent females’ life satisfaction decreases earlier than males’; this is the only substantial gender difference in life satisfaction that emerges across the wide age range studied.
One of the report’s authors, Amy Orben, University of Cambridge said there are many different explanations for why adolescents show drastic decreases in life satisfaction. “The drop in life satisfaction scores during adolescence could be driven by conditions of life getting worse during this period, which in turn decreases how satisfied adolescents are with their life.
While life satisfaction is not completely subsumed into mental health, well-mapped mental health trends in adolescence show increases in mental disorders such as depression or anxiety and decreases in other forms of subjective wellbeing.”
Second, the appraisal process that determines the response to a life satisfaction question might also change throughout adolescence due to alterations in cognitive or social processes. As adolescence is a time of substantial cognitive change and maturation, this could be modifying the way life satisfaction questions are interpreted and answered. For example, the continued development of the “social brain” in adolescence allows for increased and improved mentalising, i.e. adolescents’ skill in understanding how others think and feel,” she said.
The study highlights the importance of adopting a lifespan perspective with respect to subjective wellbeing in areas spanning research, policy and practice.
Read the full report: Trajectories of adolescent life satisfaction
Health and wellbeingYoung people
