Abstract
Considered as a key component of human capital, mental health has drawn substantial scholarly attention for its effect on people’s health status and economic outcome. When facing the challenge of stress, people’s heterogeneity in cognitive ability and non-cognitive ability causes difference in patterns of coping, resulting in different manifestations in mental health. Previous researches have shown that cognitive and non-cognitive abilities have positively direct or indirect effects on mental health, but few studies research their role of coping with air pollution. We used the China Family Panel Survey (CFPS) and matched individual data with county or district level PM2.5 information from NASA. The study found that air pollution has negative effect on mental health with every increase of 1μg/m3 in PM2.5 deteriorating mental health by 0.038 standard deviation, which is the total effect of air pollution. However, the direct effect of air pollution on mental health will decrease to 0.028 in absolute value when considering mediating effects. By employing different approaches, we found positive mediating effects via cognitive ability and non-cognitive ability. Individuals with high cognitive and non-cognitive abilities are able to accurately diagnose problems and select the optimal coping strategies, thus restoring positive mental health.
Highlights
Mental health can be a global matter, and so common that people across ages, jobs, regions might all suffer from mental illnesses
Considering the harm of air pollution to mental health from similar researches on China context [28,29,38,57], we proposed the hypothesis about the effect of air pollution: Hypothesis 1: Air pollution has a negative influence on mental health
Our study found every increase of 1μg/m3 in PM2.5 deteriorating mental health by 0.038 standard deviation in 2016 wave, which showed air pollution has negative effect on mental health
Summary
Mental health can be a global matter, and so common that people across ages, jobs, regions might all suffer from mental illnesses. According to the World Health Organization, the two most common mental disorders were depression and anxiety disorders, and these two mental disorders together caused up to one billion U.S dollars annual global productivity loss; more than 322 million people (4.4% of the global population) were suffering from depression, making it the worldwide most epidemic disease; and more than 264 million (3.4% of global population) were suffering from anxiety disorders, whose number of patients ranked sixth among all diseases [1]. From 1990 to 2017, depressive disorders developed worsen trend and became the tenth leading cause attributing to disability-adjusted life years for Chinese [2].
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