STUDY: Want ‘sustained happiness’? Get religion.

[Randy Carson]

Question: What is the best way to achieve "sustained happiness"? Is it by:

1) volunteering or working with a charity;
2) taking educational courses;
3) participating in religious organizations; or
4) participating in a political or community organization?

Answer: 3.

Researchers at the London School of Economics and Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands found that the secret to sustained happiness lies in participating in religious organizations. Of the four, participating in a religious organization was the [u]only social activity associated with sustained happiness[/u], researchers found.

Now, my question is: what if you get involved in a local church (3) that has an outreach to the poor and homeless in the local community (1 & 4) and offers Bible study classes (2)?

Seems to me you'd be so happy you could hardly stand it.

Want ‘sustained happiness’? Get religion, study suggests
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-...-suggests/

Social Participation and Depression in Old Age: A Fixed-Effects Analysis in 10 European Countries
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/182/2/168.short

Randy did you even bother to read the paper - or at least the abstract? My university has a subscription to Am. J. Epidemiol so I can send you the paper if you want, but I'll just quote the abstract below:

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• We examined whether changes in different forms of social participation were associated with changes in depressive symptoms in older Europeans. We used lagged individual fixed-effects models based on data from 9,068 persons aged ≥50 years in wave 1 (2004/2005), wave 2 (2006/2007), and wave 4 (2010/2011) of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). After we controlled for a wide set of confounders, increased participation in religious organizations predicted a decline in depressive symptoms (EURO-D Scale; possible range, 0–12) 4 years later (β = −0.190 units, 95% confidence interval: −0.365, −0.016), while participation in political/community organizations was associated with an increase in depressive symptoms (β = 0.222 units, 95% confidence interval: 0.018, 0.428). There were no significant differences between European regions in these associations. Our findings suggest that social participation is associated with depressive symptoms, but the direction and strength of the association depend on the type of social activity. Participation in religious organizations may offer mental health benefits beyond those offered by other forms of social participation.

Now I checked the lead author's credentials and she's definitely objective and credible. And I just read the paper - it's well written and certainly objective.

"With some exceptions (17), several studies have found that active participation in religious or church activities, clubs, and political groups and volunteering are associated with better mental health and reduced levels of depressive symptoms (6, 8, 11, 13 – 15)." (p.168)
6. Chiao C, Weng L-J, Botticello AL. Social participation reduces depressive symptoms among older adults: an 18-year longitudinal analysis in Taiwan. BMC Public Health. 2011;11:292.
8. Glass TA, Mendes De Leon CF, Bassuk SS, et al. Social engagement and depressive symptoms in late life: longitudinal findings. J Aging Health. 2006;184:604–628.
11. Berkman LF, Glass T, Brissette I, et al. From social integration to health: Durkheim in the new millennium. Soc Sci Med. 2000;516:843–857.
13. Croezen S, Haveman-Nies A, Alvarado VJ, et al. Characterization of different groups of elderly according to social engagement activity patterns. J Nutr Health Aging. 2009;139:776–781.
14. Bath PA, Deeg D. Social engagement and health outcomes among older people: introduction to a special section. Eur J Ageing. 2005;21:24–30.
15. von Bonsdorff MB, Rantanen T. Benefits of formal voluntary work among older people. A review. Aging Clin Exp Res. 2011;233:162–169.
17. Di Gessa G, Grundy E. The relationship between active ageing and health using longitudinal data from Denmark, France, Italy and England. J Epidemiol Community Health. 2014;683:261–267.

But the point of Croezen et al. 2015 is not to demonstrate that; it's specifically concerned with health outcomes for older European people (50+). You cannot use the results of this paper to talk about anyone other than older Europeans. It didn't look at European under 50, it didn't look at India, Australia, Japan, the USA, Russia, Brazil or anywhere other than Europe. The countries contributing to all areas of the data were Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. The data is longitudinal, which is best for this kind of study (i.e. immeasurably better than cross-sectional).

Furthermore, nowhere does the paper have anything to say about "sustained happiness".

You are aware that religion is only one kind of social participation? Also, did you read or acknowledge this?

Yes abaris, the paper specifically addressed that:

"In each wave of SHARE, respondents were asked whether they had engaged in the following activities during the last month: 1) voluntary or charity work; 2) educational or training courses; 3) sports, social clubs, or other kinds of club activities; 4) participation in religious organizations; and 5) participation in political or community organizations. For each activity, an additional question was asked about the frequency of participation, using 4 response options: “almost daily,” “almost every week,” “almost every month,” and “less often.” In wave 4, the recall period for participation in social activities was altered to refer to the last 12 months. To maintain consistency in the recall period, our analysis focused on changes in social participation between waves 1 and 2 only." (p.169)


Figure 2.
Four-year-lagged associations (β coefficients) between changes in social participation and changes in depressive symptom scores among selected respondents (participants in waves 1, 2, and 4) aged 50 years or older (n = 7,385), by geographical region, Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, 2004–2011. White columns represent Northern Europe, gray columns represent Western Europe, and black columns represent Southern Europe. T-shaped bars, robust 95% confidence intervals (CIs).

"Our findings suggest that social participation is associated with levels of depressive symptoms; however, the strength and direction of the association depend on the type of activity. Participation in religious activities was the only form of social engagement associated with a decline in depressive symptoms 4 years later." (p. 173)

So back to the OP, Randy Carson, the results do not show what you claim at all. In fact if you'd bothered to read the paper you would have seen this paragraph:

"Earlier research found that religiously active persons have better mental health than the religiously inactive (24, 42). Our findings suggest that this association might reflect a causal association. Participation in religious organizations may protect mental health through several pathways, including influencing lifestyle, enhancing social support networks, and offering a mechanism for coping with stress (24, 42). For example, religion has been shown to serve as a coping mechanism during a period of illness in late life (43, 44). Through participation in religious activities, people may also become more attached to their communities, which prevents social isolation, a predictor of old-age depression. Spirituality has also been proposed as an important promoter of mental health, but this construct is not well defined, and its relationship with depression is not well understood (24). By contrast, people may not accrue the same social support, lifestyle, and coping benefits from participating in sports, social clubs, or other kinds of clubs, which may explain why these forms of social participation did not predict levels of depressive symptoms 4 years later. Although we expected stronger associations between social participation and depressive symptoms in Northern and Western European countries, the lack of regional differences in the associations across Europe supports the findings of Di Gessa and Grundy (17)." (pp. 173-174)

In which researchers specifically state that religious activity may be a confounder. In otherwords, they admit that their study was not a paired one - i.e. controlled for other lifestyle factors. I certainly agree that religious activity is associated with better health (see the link in my sig), however it is not proven that religion itself is the factor, and this clearly shows that further study is required. Until someone does a study controlled for lifestyle factors (i.e. paired participants) we cannot know whether it is religion itself or if religion is a confounder. What I mean by pair is that it's stratified - you want people who are as similar as possible to each other with the only difference being religious activity. Since that's difficult to obtain on a large scale you do it on an individual scale; so if you have 1000 participants with 500 in each group (religious and non-religious) each one of those people has someone in the other group with the same age, gender, and lifestyle to them except for religion.

Here's another limitation mentioned in the paper:

"Another concern is reverse causation. Although we found that participation in a religious organization was associated with decreased depression scores over a 4-year period, we cannot completely rule out the possibility that this association may have been due to the impact of depression on social participation." (p. 174)

Being diagnosed as suffering from a depressive disorder, suffering from it, and then getting better may result in the patient then increasing their religious activity.

"Further research is required to identify the specific mechanisms that explain the association between participation in religious activities and depressive symptoms. If the association is proven to be causal, however, our results suggest that policies encouraging or enabling older persons to maintain their affiliations with religious communities (e.g., by facilitating their attendance at religious events via public transport) may result in reduced levels of depressive symptoms among older persons." (p. 174)

The happiness or unhappiness of religious people has no bearing on the validity of religious claims.

Also.....Are you suggesting that one can choose to believe....and that we should because it will make us feel fuzzy?

Absolutely correct. It doesn't matter which religion you belong to, the health benefit is irrespective of the belief system, it's irrespective of your own beliefs, and it's only dependant on religious participation (prayer, church attendance, meditation, etc.)

This study is BS, first it only interviews people over 50, so it limits its Ideas of happiness to one age demographic. Second it only gives people the choices of :

1. Work with charity
2. Taking classes
3. church
4. political organization

Third how do they know it's "sustained happiness" how did they measure this, how do they know the happiness will or has been sustained?

Also, If they interviewed 9000 atheists with the same four options, my guess is one of the other 3 options would be revealed as the key to sustaining happiness.

Completely incorrect. The study did not use their own data, they obtained the data from Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and analysed it. Therefore it wasn't up to the researchers what questions to ask. And you should have known this because it says so in the paper abstract. Secondly the paper does NOT discuss "sustained happiness". Thirdly no, as you can see in Figure 2 above, religious participation was the only one with improved health outcomes for persons over 50 suffering from depressive disorders in all areas of Europe. But as you can also see the effect does depend on the European region and those in Northern Europe had the greatest benefit.

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