JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Aim：Populations are rapidly aging all over the world. The concern for the nursing to general health of the older people was essential to constructing a positive aging society. Emotional experience plays an important role in predicting the general health of older people. To certify the mediating effect of depression on the association between emotional experience and general health to comprehensively understand the relationship between them. Design: Secondary analysis of data. Methods：A large sample of 8839 older adults from the 2017-2018 survey of the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey (CLHLS) was included. The emotional experience questionnaire, the 10-item CES-D scale (Center for Epidemiologic Studies Short Depression Scale) were applied to assess the older people’s emotional experience and depression respectively. Self-reported quality of life (QoL) and Self-reported health were used to evaluate the general health of the older people. IBM SPSS Statistics 25.0 and AMOS version 23.0 were adopted to analyze the data. Results：The average age of participants was 81.27±10.29 years. Among the older people, more positive affect was more pronounced among those with younger age, longer years of schooling, higher income of household, greater social security and social insurance, less depression level, higher self-rated health level. Depression had a partial mediation effect of emotional experience on general health, which explained 36% of variance totally (R2=0.36). In addition, emotional experience had a statistically significant direct effect on general health (β= 0.290, P<0.001). Furthermore, the indirect effect of emotional experience on general health was 0.228. Conclusions：Depression was an unignored mediator which regulated the effect of emotional experience on general health in the elderly. Nursing of emotion regulation may help prevent depression and promote the emotional well-being of the older people.