Mortality Risks, Subjective Well-Being and Polygenic Scores: Evidence from the Health and Retirement Study

The relationship between an individual’s subjective well-being and their future mortality prospects has been well documented. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study combined with genetic information, we present empirical evidence of how this relationship operates through various channels. Our findings reveal that both the genetic and environmental factors contributing to subjective well-being have a significant impact not only on the objective mortality of participants in our study, but also on the bias in their survival estimation—measured as the disparity between individuals’ subjective and objective survival probabilities. Our gender-specific analyses further reveal diverging observations for females and males in terms of explaining the bias in survival estimation.