Perceived change in happiness and depressive symptoms

Abstract

Depression / depressive symptoms have been widely studied; however, the literature has not sufficiently addressed the effect of contrast on depressive symptoms. This is particularly important in the South African context, given the high levels of depressive symptoms, when compared to other countries. This study aims to understand and quantify the effect of contrast on depressive symptoms by making use of ordinary least squared, System-GMM, and heterogeneity based instrumental variable regression. The latter two methods are used in order to remove differing forms of endogeneity bias. The analysis suggests that those who consider they are more happy than they were ten years ago have lower depressive symptoms than those who do not consider their level of happiness has changed. This is consistent for those individuals who have correct recall and those that have incorrect recall of contrast. Interestingly, the analysis finds that those who consider they are less happy have higher depressive symptoms, however, only when recall is correct. These findings highlight the importance of memory and perceptions, on depressive symptoms. They provide evidence in support of new (and old) types of memory training techniques which could be used to combat depression.