In this study, by employing large-scale survey data from four waves of the US Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we explore the (potentially long-lasting) effects of individuals’ exposure to psychologically traumatic life experiences on their subjective well-being. To this aim, we exploit the richness of our dataset, that contains information about occurrence and timing of a set of extreme events out of individuals’ control that may leave a “scar” extending to their current levels of life satisfaction in general as well as with regard to specific life domains. Our findings indicate that having a close relative hit by a life-threatening illness or accident and, especially, having been victim of a serious physical attack or assault are negatively related to both general and domain-specific life satisfaction, even after controlling for personality traits. Next, life satisfaction is significantly lowered by being physically abused by a parent. Overall, we provide evidence that the effects of some traumatic events are persistent over time and mostly related to women. Surprisingly, the effects of child death are negligible also in the short term.

在这项研究中，我们利用来自美国健康与退休研究（HRS）的四次浪潮的大规模调查数据，探讨了个人暴露于心理创伤性生活经历对他们的主观幸福感的影响（可能持续） 。为此，我们利用数据集的丰富性，其中包含有关一系列极端事件的发生和时间安排的信息，这些事件的发生超出了个人的控制范围，可能使“疤痕”延伸至他们目前的总体生活满意度水平，以及关于特定的生活领域。我们的研究结果表明，受到威胁生命的疾病或事故的近亲袭击，尤其是遭受严重的人身攻击或殴打的受害者与一般和特定领域的生活满意度均呈负相关，即使在控制了人格特质之后。其次，被父母身体虐待会大大降低生活满意度。总体而言，我们提供的证据表明，某些创伤事件的影响会随着时间的流逝而持续存在，并且主要与女性有关。令人惊讶的是，儿童死亡的影响在短期内也可以忽略不计。