Lomas Tim, Noah Padgett R, Ritchie-Dunham James L, Lee Matthew T, Pawelski James O, Shiba Koichiro, Johnson Byron R, VanderWeele Tyler J
Harvard University, Cambridge, USA.
University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA.
Sci Rep. 2025 Apr 30;15(1):11328. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-83353-z.
Great efforts have been expended studying how people's childhood affects their life in adulthood. Although attention has mostly focused on 'negative' outcomes, such as mental illness, paradigms like positive psychology have encouraged interest in desirable phenomena too. Yet amidst this 'positive turn' some desiderata have still received scant engagement, including inner peace. This lacuna perhaps reflects the Western-centric nature of academia, with low arousal positive emotions regarded as being relatively undervalued in the West. But aligning with broader efforts to redress this Western-centricity is an emergent literature on this topic. This report adds to this by presenting cross-sectional wave 1 data from the most ambitious longitudinal study to date of inner peace, namely as an item - "In general, how often do you feel you are at peace with your thoughts and feelings?" - in the Global Flourishing Study, an intended five-year study investigating the predictors of human flourishing involving (in this first year) 202,898 participants from 22 countries. This exploratory paper looks at 13 childhood predictors of peace, using random effects meta-analysis to aggregate all findings, focusing on three research questions. First, how do recalled aspects of a child's upbringing predict peace in adulthood, for which the most impactful factor on average was self-rated health growing up, with Risk Ratios, relative to "good", ranging from 0.93 for "poor" to 1.07 for "excellent". Second, do associations vary by country, with the effect of poor self-rated health spanning 0.37 in Turkey to 1.19 in Nigeria. Third, are relationships robust to potential unmeasured confounding, as assessed by E-values, for which the effect of poor health growing up is robust up to an unmeasured confounder association Risk Ratio of 1.36 with inner peace. These results shed valuable new light on the long-term causal dynamics of this overlooked but important topic.
人们在研究童年如何影响成年生活方面付出了巨大努力。尽管注意力大多集中在诸如精神疾病等“负面”结果上，但诸如积极心理学等范式也激发了人们对理想现象的兴趣。然而，在这种“积极转向”中，一些需求仍未得到充分关注，其中包括内心平静。这一空白或许反映了学术界以西方为中心的性质，低唤醒的积极情绪在西方被认为相对不受重视。但与此纠正这种以西方为中心倾向的更广泛努力相一致的，是关于这个主题的新兴文献。本报告通过呈现来自迄今为止最雄心勃勃的关于内心平静的纵向研究的横断面第1波数据，为这一领域增添了内容，该数据是在全球繁荣研究中作为一个项目出现的——“总体而言，你觉得自己与自己的思想和感受处于平和状态的频率有多高？”——这是一项为期五年的研究，旨在调查人类繁荣的预测因素，（在第一年）涉及来自22个国家的202,898名参与者。这篇探索性论文研究了内心平静的13个童年预测因素，使用随机效应荟萃分析汇总所有研究结果，重点关注三个研究问题。第一，儿童成长经历的回忆方面如何预测成年后的内心平静，平均而言，最具影响力的因素是成长过程中的自评健康状况，相对于“良好”，风险比范围从“差”的0.93到“优秀”的1.07。第二，这些关联在不同国家是否存在差异，自评健康状况差的影响在土耳其为0.37，在尼日利亚为1.19。第三，这些关系对于潜在的未测量混杂因素是否稳健，通过E值评估，成长过程中健康状况差的影响在未测量混杂因素与内心平静的关联风险比达到1.36之前都是稳健的。这些结果为这个被忽视但重要的主题的长期因果动态提供了宝贵的新见解。
