In an era of great political divide, a recent study carried out by Columbia University reveals an intriguing relationship between political ideology and adolescent happiness.
The research, published in the journal “Social Science & Medicine – Mental Health,” indicates that conservative teenagers generally exhibit higher levels of happiness than their liberal counterparts, a trend that, though striking, remains something of a mystery to liberals.
The study, aptly titled “The Politics of Depression: Diverging Trends in Internalizing Symptoms among US Adolescents by Political Beliefs,” was the brainchild of epidemiologist Catherine Gimbrone and her team.
Gimbrone and her coauthors assessed and compared the depressive attitudes of high school seniors from 2005 to 2018, dividing participants based on their political leanings.
Participants favoring conservative views, defined by the study as upholding individual liberty, right-wing social and religious values, and unregulated free markets, were contrasted with those subscribing to liberal ideas, defined as supporting equal opportunity, semi-regulated markets, civil liberties, and social justice.
The research’s conclusion was unexpected to the authors: conservative teenagers reported lower average scores for depressive feelings, self-derogation, and loneliness, and higher self-esteem scores compared to their liberal peers. This pattern held true irrespective of gender among conservative teens.
The study also identified trends in mental health among liberal teenagers. Between 2011 and 2018, depressive symptoms rose sharply among liberal females.
Liberal males showed a similar trend between 2005 and 2011, but by 2013, the increase in depressive symptoms among males had tapered off, lagging behind that of females.
The research team also discovered a surprising relationship between family education levels and depression. The findings suggest that children from more educated families were more likely to experience depression.
Gimbrone’s team theorized that conservative ideology could serve as a psychological buffer, aligning an idealized worldview with the harsh realities many adolescents face. This could explain the lower levels of depressive symptoms among conservative teenagers.
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They also suggested that liberals’ mental health might be influenced by significant political events such as the 2008 election of a black president, the Great Recession, the student debt crisis, Republicans seizing control of Congress, and Donald Trump’s 2016 victory.
In addition, the researchers noted that escalating awareness of issues like war, climate change, school shootings, structural racism, police violence against Black people, pervasive sexism, sexual assault, and socioeconomic inequality might have exacerbated emotional distress among liberal adolescents.
Columbia University Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi provided further insights in an article for American Affairs, noting that conservatives not only report higher happiness levels but also express more meaning in their lives.
“Conservatives are more likely to be patriotic and religious. They are more likely to be (happily) married and less likely to divorce. Religiosity, in turn, correlates with greater subjective and objective well-being. So does patriotism. So does marriage,” wrote al-Gharbi.
He suggested that conservatism may be incidental to the happiness gap and that a liberal individual exhibiting similar levels of religiosity, patriotism, or marital happiness might experience similar levels of happiness as conservative peers.
Journalist Matthew Yglesias also weighed in on the findings in his article, “Why are young liberals so depressed?” He suggested that individuals dealing with anxiety or depression might be more likely to focus unproductively on problems rather than seeking solutions or acceptance.
David Brooks, a New York Times Opinion Columnist, argued that many on the left have begun to experience what he termed “maladaptive sadness,” characterized by a catastrophizing mentality, extreme sensitivity to harm, and a culture of denunciation.
“For many, America’s problems came to seem endemic: The American dream is a sham, climate change is so unstoppable, systemic racism is eternal,” he wrote. “Making catastrophic pronouncements became a way to display that you were woke to the brutalities of American life.”
The period of time covered in this study is pre-pandemic and before the horrible riots surrounding “black lives matter,” and before the defund the police movement.
It was before the 2020 election, before the Jan 6 Capitol Hill riot, monster inflation, before the Russian-Ukraine war and before the disaster going on at the border with the end of Title 42.
One can only extrapolate how this study would come out if 2019-present were included. The very people the woke left hate are the ones who go through life happier. Go figure.