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In the article Happy People Live Longer: Subjective Well-Being Contributes to Health
and Longevity, the authors Ed Diener and Micaela Y. Chan maintain that the aspects of positive
well-being such as life-satisfaction, optimism, absence of negative emotion entail a long life
expectancy. They argue on the merit of the findings from empirical research that factors like
stress, anxiety and depression often lead to serious illness. Hemingway and Marmot (as cited by
Diener and Chan 2011) showed that 11 out of 11 prospective cases, depression and anxiety
caused coronary heart disease among healthy people. Diene and Chan (2011) argue that
physiological changes resulting from emotions and moods are invariably related to the changes
in health. However, it also maintains that this aspect of positive well-being may not cure illness
in a sick population.
However, in the article Does happiness itself directly affect mortality? The prospective
UK Million Women Study, Richard Peto et al maintain a diametrically opposite stance regarding
the issue. The authors, Peto et al. (2016), contend that poor health is a root cause of unhappiness,
not the other way round. To elucidate, they believe that happiness does not entail longer life
expectancy; rather happiness itself results from good health. The researchers try to establish their
claim by allowing for poor lifestyle and ill health in people. It was observed that among the
719671 respondents of the study, 44% women were occasionally happy and 17% are suffered
from chronic unhappiness. However, study showed that after the self-evaluation of health,
treatments for chronic and major diseases such as asthma, diabetes, and other socio-
demographical factors, e.g. smoking, low BMI elevated the happiness level among the
respondents as well (Peto et al. 2016).

Happiness and Longevity

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