No Benefits of Seeing a Dark Future? A Note on Recent Findings on the Effects of Forecasting Life Satisfaction

Abstract

In the recent article (Lang et al., 2013), the authors explore functional outcomes of life satisfaction with regard to hazards of mortality using the adult life span sample of the national German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). The results suggest that “being overly optimistic predicting a better future than actually observed was associated with […] a great risk of mortality within the following decade”. In this note, we analyze the same data set using the same model, but – in addition to the self-rated health in starting year included in the model by Lang et al. (2013) – we furthermore control for the self-rated health at the target year. With this modification, it turns out that the accuracy of anticipated future life satisfaction has no significant effect on the mortality.