Abstract
Over the past few decades, the role of self-views in life satisfaction has been extensively investigated. Recently, growing attention has been directed to the question of whether an optimistic worldview, termed “reward for application”, helps boost life satisfaction. Conceptually, the association between reward for application and life satisfaction can be paradoxical. Due to various methodological and theoretical shortfalls, previous investigations were unable to draw a robust conclusion on this association. To address these shortfalls, two cross-lagged panel studies were conducted with different time lags. Over and above the potential confounds of self-views (namely, self-esteem and self-rated personality traits), reward for application had a positive effect on lagged life satisfaction among both adolescents and young adults, while the reverse effect was not found. Moreover, we found support for the multiplicative effect between worldviews and self-views, in which the positive effect of reward for application on life satisfaction was attenuated by high self-esteem.
Highlights
The study of what predicts life satisfaction is an interesting one, but what makes some people happier than others? Myers and Diener [1] reviewed many studies to identify certain “happy traits”such as self-esteem and the personality trait of extraversion
A confirmatory factor analytic model was established with three parcels loaded on a latent factor of reward for application and three parcels loaded on a latent factor of life satisfaction in each time point, yielding four latent factors in total
A confirmatory factor analytic model with constraints on factor loadings was compared with the unconstrained model
Summary
Myers and Diener [1] reviewed many studies to identify certain “happy traits”. Such as self-esteem and the personality trait of extraversion. Meta-analyzed data from approximately 12,600 participants across 31 nations and found a moderately strong association between self-esteem and life satisfaction (r = 0.47). Self-esteem reflects a positive evaluation towards the self, while self-rated personality traits reflect one’s perception of the self and the evaluation of one’s own attributes. Previous research conceptualized these two psychological variables as self-views, which represent beliefs and perceptions about oneself [7,8]
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