Abstract
Socioeconomic status is associated with health disparities, but underlying psychosocial mechanisms have not been fully identified. Dispositional optimism may be a psychosocial process linking socioeconomic status with health. We hypothesized that lower optimism would be associated with greater social disadvantage and poorer social mobility. We also investigated whether life satisfaction and positive affect showed similar patterns. Participants from the Midlife in the United States study self-reported their optimism, satisfaction, positive affect, and socioeconomic status (gender, race/ethnicity, education, occupational class and prestige, income). Social disparities in optimism were evident. Optimistic individuals tended to be white and highly educated, had an educated parent, belonged to higher occupational classes with more prestige, and had higher incomes. Findings were generally similar for satisfaction, but not positive affect. Greater optimism and satisfaction were also associated with educational achievement across generations. Optimism and life satisfaction are consistently linked with socioeconomic advantage and may be one conduit by which social disparities influence health.
Highlights
Disparities in health and longevity based on socioeconomic status (SES) are well established [1]
Optimism is relevant for health outcomes [6,7,9,10] and is an important psychosocial asset in its own right [5], little is known about its social distribution, among U.S adults
We examined dispositional optimism’s social structural patterning in the context of a social disparities framework and compared findings on optimism with two more commonly assessed measures of psychological assets in epidemiological cohorts: life satisfaction and positive affect
Summary
Disparities in health and longevity based on socioeconomic status (SES) are well established [1]. Poverty and/or the experience of being a racial or ethnic minority may suppress optimistic tendencies because individuals encounter more demanding environments and have fewer resources to combat challenges [20] Because they are more frequently exposed to unpredictable and difficult situations, individuals of low SES are more likely to develop a schema that the world is threatening, and interpret ambiguous events with more negative and fewer positive attributions. Our primary aim was to investigate dispositional optimism’s association with a set of social structural factors related to health disparities: gender, race/ethnicity, education level (of the participant and his or her parents), occupational class, occupational prestige, and income. To our knowledge, limited research has considered whether different psychological assets are influenced by social mobility
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