Authors: Owen Richard Lightsey Richelle McGhee Audrey Ervin George Gharibian Gharghani Eli Benjamin Rarey Rosaire Patrick Daigle Katherine Frances Wright Donnalin Constantin Kevin Powell
Publish Date: 2012/01/07
Volume: 14, Issue: 1, Pages: 1-18
Abstract
Life satisfaction is an important index of mental health and also predicts other important outcomes such as longevity and decreased mortality Negative affect has a unique inverse relationship with life satisfaction across the life span Therefore determining psychological factors that uniquely predict future life satisfaction and that reduce the trait negative affect—life satisfaction relationship is theoretically and clinically important In light of recent evidence from longterm longitudinal studies that selfefficacy for regulation of negative emotions SERN predicts higher future life satisfaction as well as evidence from a crosssectional study that a subtype of SERN—selfefficacy for regulating anger—buffers the relationship between trait negative affect and life satisfaction we tested whether SERN and subtypes of SERN predicted higher life satisfaction and buffered the negative affect—life satisfaction relationship longitudinally over short time periods After controlling for time 1 life satisfaction higher time 1 selfefficacy for regulating despondency and distress SEDes predicted higher future life satisfaction over average time periods of 17 days N = 127 32 days N = 83 and 41 days N = 65 among college students However in post hoc exploratory regressions that included selfefficacy for experience and expression of positive emotions SEPos SEDes predicted higher time 2 life satisfaction but only SEPos uniquely predicted higher time 3 and time 4 life satisfaction
Keywords: