The role of victim sensitivity between anti-welfare dependence attitude and mental health of older adults in China

Abstract

The ideals of the anti-welfare tendency may confront the realization of deficient, dependent, and delicate bodies, adding to a sense of bodily betrayal, which encumbers independence and sets older adults toward despair. The resulting collision may lead older adults who have perceived the law of the jungle to go to two extremes: either fall into social depression, or enhance their positive attitude, and be spurred to cultivate a positive mentality. Therefore, this study focuses on assessing the potential interaction between the law of the jungle and the anti-welfare attitude in shaping mental health. Based on the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) data in 2017, this study adopts the multivariate regression method to comprehensively address the theory-of-pragmatic-prospection-based relationship between the law of the jungle, anti-welfare tendency, and mental health of older adults, including concurrently coherent conceptualization and examination of core psychological perception indicators of the law of the jungle, such as victim sensitivity. The findings suggest that the anti-welfare dependence attitude positively correlates with mental health (coefficient = 0.618, p < 0.001). Victim sensitivity strengthens the above relationship (coefficient = 0.129, p < 0.001). Self-reliance has become part of the invisible armor that modern seniors equip themselves with against the risks of the law of the jungle. And precisely because the perception of the law of the jungle reinforces the fear that one’s own capacity is not sufficient to deal with emergencies, older adults are more likely to conform to the official discourse of productive aging and become more self-reliant. Although from the perspective of individual psychological mechanisms, the combination of the anti-welfare attitude and the law of the jungle has strengthened the mental health of older adults, there are still long-term hidden challenges: if the state is absent for a long time, when the external risk world is no longer within the control of the private welfare of older adults, will they be overwhelmed by pressures, enter a threshold, move to the other side of the resilience fracture, and fall into social depression? This study will leave it to future research to test these alternative explanations.