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Affect, Affective Variability, and Physical Health: Results from a Population-Based Investigation in China

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Abstract

Background

There is good evidence linking positive affect with adaptive psychological and physical health outcomes and negative affect with maladaptive outcomes, in multiple contexts and samples. However, recent research has suggested that the fluctuation of emotions, known as affective variability, may also be an important correlate of individuals’ health.

Purpose

The present study examined the relationship between affect, affective variability, and self-reported health status in a large representative sample of adults in China.

Method

We analyzed cross-sectional data retrieved from the World Health Organization’s study on global ageing and adults’ health. A total of 15,050 Chinese adults (aged between 18 and 99) from China reported their affective experiences during the previous day, perceived health, and their history of multiple chronic illnesses from their medical records (stroke, angina, diabetes, chronic lung disease, depression, and hypertension). Hierarchical multiple regression and logistic regression analyses were employed to analyze the data.

Results

Independent of individuals’ mean levels of affect, affective variability was negatively related to subjective health conditions and positively related to diagnosed illness status, after controlling for demographic variables. Results suggest that affective variability increases the likelihood of reported impaired health and diagnosis of affect-related illnesses such as angina and depression.

Conclusion

The present study highlighted the importance of studying the impact of affective variability, in addition to that of mean affect levels, on health.

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Notes

  1. Single-item measure of self-rated health was widely used in health research, which intended to get an overall assessment or self-rating of participant’s health in general. Numerous studies have demonstrated that self-reported health is a valid and reliable indicator of one’s overall health status. It is a strong predictor of mortality [53–55], subsequent disability [56, 57], morbidity [58], and utilization of medical care [55, 59, 60].

  2. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted to explore the factor structure of daily affect, and a two-factor solution emerged when an eigenvalue is higher than 1.00. After a principal component analysis with varimax rotation, two items loaded highly on one factor named positive affect (mean factor loading = .75), and five items loaded highly on another factor named negative affect (mean factor loading = .93). The item content clearly reflected the factor label in each case, and the two-factor model accounted for 68.02 % of the total variance. Therefore, we used positive affect and negative affect to represent two different types of affect in our study.

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Acknowledgments

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research (a starting fund from Peking University, reference No. 419-17702-002 to Dr. Xin Zhang)

Conflict of Interest

Xin Zhang, Derwin K. C. Chan, Helene H. Fung, and Martin S. Hagger declare that they have no conflict of interest associated with the content of this paper.

Informed Consent

The data in the present study was obtained from a public survey conducted by World Health Organization, and the treatment of human participants associated with the data was in accordance with the ethical standards of APA. WHO conformed to the Helsinki Declaration concerning human rights and informed consent, and they followed correct procedures concerning treatment of humans in research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Human Performance, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

    Derwin K. C. Chan

  2. Department of Psychology and Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University, Beijing, China, 100871

    Xin Zhang

  3. Department of Psychology, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, SAR, China

    Helene H. Fung

  4. Health Psychology and Behavioural Medicine Research Group, School of Psychology and Speech Pathology, Curtin University, Perth, Australia

    Martin S. Hagger

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  1. Derwin K. C. Chan
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  2. Xin Zhang
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  4. Martin S. Hagger
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Correspondence to Xin Zhang.

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Chan, D.K.C., Zhang, X., Fung, H.H. et al. Affect, Affective Variability, and Physical Health: Results from a Population-Based Investigation in China. Int.J. Behav. Med. 23, 438–446 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12529-015-9510-2

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