Is It Helpful to Believe That Efforts Will Lead to Positive Outcomes? Two Cross-Lagged Panel Investigations among Adolescents and Young Adults

Jacky C. K. Ng, Vince W. T. Cheung, Helen S. M. Wong, Sherry M. Y. Leung and Victor C. Y. Lau
Additional contact information
Jacky C. K. Ng: Department of Counselling and Psychology, Hong Kong Shue Yan University, Hong Kong, China
Vince W. T. Cheung: Department of Applied Social Sciences, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China
Helen S. M. Wong: Division of Business and Hospitality Management, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China
Sherry M. Y. Leung: Division of Business and Hospitality Management, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China
Victor C. Y. Lau: Department of Social Work, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China

IJERPH, 2020, vol. 17, issue 20, 1-14

Abstract: Over the past few decades, the role of self-views in life satisfaction has been extensively investigated. Recently, growing attention has been directed to the question of whether an optimistic worldview, termed “reward for application”, helps boost life satisfaction. Conceptually, the association between reward for application and life satisfaction can be paradoxical. Due to various methodological and theoretical shortfalls, previous investigations were unable to draw a robust conclusion on this association. To address these shortfalls, two cross-lagged panel studies were conducted with different time lags. Over and above the potential confounds of self-views (namely, self-esteem and self-rated personality traits), reward for application had a positive effect on lagged life satisfaction among both adolescents and young adults, while the reverse effect was not found. Moreover, we found support for the multiplicative effect between worldviews and self-views, in which the positive effect of reward for application on life satisfaction was attenuated by high self-esteem.

Keywords: reward for application; life satisfaction; worldviews; self-views; self-esteem; young adults; adolescents (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/20/7585/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/20/7585/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:17:y:2020:i:20:p:7585-:d:430944

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().