Sense of Purpose in Life and Subsequent Physical, Behavioral, and Psychosocial Health: An Outcome-Wide Approach
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose: Growing evidence indicates that a higher sense of purpose in life ( purpose) is associated with reduced risk of chronic diseases and mortality. However, epidemiological studies have not evaluated if change in purpose is associated with subsequent health and well-being outcomes. Design: We evaluated if positive change in purpose (between t 0 ; 2006/2008 and t 1 ;2010/2012) was associated with better outcomes on 35 indicators of physical health, health behaviors, and psychosocial well-being (at t 2 ;2014/2016). Sample: We used data from 12,998 participants in the Health and Retirement study—a prospective and nationally representative cohort of U.S. adults aged >50. Analysis: We conducted multiple linear-, logistic-, and generalized linear regressions. Results: Over the 4-year follow-up period, people with the highest (versus lowest) purpose had better subsequent physical health outcomes (e.g., 46% reduced risk of mortality (95% CI [0.44, 0.66])), health behaviors (e.g., 13% reduced risk of sleep problems (95% CI [0.77, 0.99])), and psychosocial outcomes (e.g., higher optimism (β = 0.41, 95% CI [0.35, 0.47]), 43% reduced risk of depression (95% CI [0.46, 0.69]), lower loneliness (β = −0.35, 95% CI [−0.41, −0.29])). Importantly, however, purpose was not associated with other physical health outcomes, health behaviors, and social factors. Conclusion: With further research, these results suggest that sense of purpose might be a valuable target for innovative policy and intervention work aimed at improving health and well-being.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it