Subjective health, intimacy, and perceived self-efficacy after heart attack: Predicting life quality five years afterwards

Abstract

In a national sample of some 400 cardiac patients and their wives, changes in quality of life were investigated during an extended period of physical and psychosocial recovery. Scores on the Bradburn Affect Balance Scale were found to be strongly correlated with Pearson coefficients in the vicinity of 0.7 over a five-year period, indicating a certain stability of subjective perceptions of well-being and ill-being. just as neuroticism and extraversion have been found to discriminate between ‘happy’ and ‘unhappy’ people in several studies, the stability of well-being in our study appeared to be influenced by subjective health perceptions, a sense of self-efficacy, and relatively stable socio-environmental conditions associated with the level of spouse intimacy and marital stress. Substantial health-related and interpersonal problems appeared to be the cause of an erosion of feelings of personal competence and, therefore, to be predictive of high negative affect and ill-being. In contrast, positive health perceptions and marital intimacy were directly related to a sense of well-being. Stable socio-environmental conditions and perceived self-efficacy are suggested as salient factors in causal models of the effect of life events on well-being.