Longitudinal asynchrony between depressive symptoms and life satisfaction: a 14-year contemporaneous correlation

Despite the apparent association between depressive experience and life satisfaction, little is known whether the two constructs are linked under a causal process. Previous investigations have suggested correlations based on the between-person differences, but such mere presence of cross-sectional association is insufficient to claim whether depressive experiences share concurring bases with cognitive evaluation of life satisfaction. This study thus focused on identifying the contemporaneous correlation between experiences of depression and life satisfaction and tested whether complex subcomponents of well-being intercorrelate in a time-synchronized way. This study utilized a dataset including adults from midlife to older age in the Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging (KLoSA). The survey assessed depressive symptoms and domains of satisfaction throughout eight waves of repeated follow-ups every 2 years. The analysis examined the associations with between-person (cross-sectional) and within-person (longitudinal) effects. We found that the extent of longitudinal correlation between the two constructs was generally lower in the within-person than between-person associations, indicated as temporal asynchrony. The satisfactions in domains of health and economic status showed a relatively higher within-person correlation while satisfaction in spousal and children relationships showed minimalized within-person correlations. The result suggests that the link between depressive experience and life satisfaction is less concurrent, ruling out the explanatory model that views subjective well-being as a direct causal construction of affective experience within a specific time point. Our finding implies that the observed association between depressive symptoms and life satisfaction is largely based on accumulated through lifetime indirect pathways rather than direct reference of appraised information.