Childhood predictors of inner peace: A cross-national analysis of the Global Flourishing Study

Great efforts have been expended studying how people’s childhood affects outcomes later in life. Although attention has mostly focused on ‘negative’ outcomes, such as mental illness, paradigms like positive psychology have encouraged interest in desirable phenomena too. Yet amidst this ‘positive turn’ some desiderata have still received scant engagement, including inner peace. This lacuna perhaps reflects the Western-centric nature of academia, with low arousal positive emotions being relatively undervalued in the West. But aligning with broader efforts to redress this Western-centricity is an emergent literature on this topic. This report adds to this by presenting the most ambitious study to date of inner peace, namely as an item – “In general, how often do you feel you are at peace with your thoughts and feelings?” – in the Global Flourishing Study, an intended five-year study investigating the predictors of human flourishing involving (in this first year) 202,898 participants from 22 countries. This paper looks at the childhood predictors of peace, using random effects meta-analysis to aggregate all findings, focusing on three research questions. First, how do recalled aspects of a child's upbringing predict peace in adulthood, for which the most impactful factor on average was self-rated health growing up, with Risk Ratios spanning, relative to “good”, 0.93 for “poor” (95% CI [0.88,0.99]) to 1.07 for “excellent” (95% CI [1.04,1.11]). Second, do associations vary by country, with the effect of poor self-rated health spanning 0.37 in Türkiye (95% CI [0.18,0.77]) to 1.19 in Nigeria (95% CI [1.08,1.31]). Third, are relationships robust to potential unmeasured confounding, as assessed by E-values, for which the effect of poor health growing up is robust up to unmeasured confounder association risk ratios of 1.36 with inner peace. These results shed new valuable light on the long-term causal dynamics of this overlooked topic.