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Relationship between Education and Mental Health: New Evidence from Twin Study
- jlg23 10y agoThe title is misleading, though the original is not descriptive. Suggestion: "Higher education does not improve mental health, twin-study proves"
- dang 10y agoWe reset the title to that of the article, shortened to fit 80 chars.
- robbiep 10y agoIt's a journal article title, not linkbait. Most scientific articles don't give away the ending, they're just a statement of what is. The idea presumably being, you must read at least the abstract
- Angostura 10y agoThat would have been a useful title. Even the payoff in the abstract 'Results from our analyses suggest that the observed association between education and mental health is attributable to confounding on unobserved variables.' would have left some people none-the-wiser.
- nabla9 10y ago"proof" is not correct term. Find evidence supporting some hypothesis, they don't provide proofs.
- redxblood 10y agoI don't see the surprise however.
- exit 10y agoit's spelt out in the abstract, no? > Prior research has documented a strong and positive correlation between completed education and adults’ mental health. ... > Results from our analyses suggest that the observed association between education and mental health is attributable to confounding on unobserved variables.
- kome 10y agosociology was right.
- atdt 10y agoFull text on SciHub: http://sci-hub.cc/10.1093/sf/sow035 http://sci-hub.cc/10.1093/sf/sow035 (PDF)
- bolster 10y agoTL:DR "If there are social factors that systematically drive differences in mental health within pairs of MZ twins, our findings suggest that education is not among them."
- Kronopath 10y agoSo in short, by comparing identical twins, this study found that people with better mental health tended to achieve a higher education, meaning that the arrow of causality doesn't go the other way: education doesn't necessarily improve mental health.
- jostmey 10y agoThe study argues that the positive relationship between mental health and higher levels of education is due to confounding factors. The take home message seems to be that higher levels education is not important to mental health. I think the larger narrative here is that higher education is not as important to success as previously believed. Was someone successful because they went to college, or were they already on a trajectory for success, and they just happened to attend college because they were offered a free ride?
- ausjke 10y agoIt's all statistics, I would think the highly educated has a higher probability to be more successful then the less educated when a large sample pool is used?
- GalacticDomin8r 10y agoIt's turtles all the way down.
- openasocket 10y agoI think that depends a lot of your definition of success. Are we defining success in terms of general health and wellbeing? In terms of life satisfaction? In terms of wealth?
- foobarbecue 10y agoNice to see this linked to the original article rather than to a pop article misrepresenting it.
- cairo_x 10y ago"confounding factors. " I'm going to go ahead and state the obvious. School systems (all social systems) filter for (relatively) functionally stable individuals. This is the case with the work-force too, and easily explains the correlation between the unemployed and the mentally ill. One does not cause the other, one filters out the other. I guess it's easy to ignore this dark possibility; it would imply deep, and possibly irreparable facts of human nature.
- ap22213 10y agoI wonder if this a relatively new phenomenon, or if it has always been the case.