According to a study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health (July 2011), teenagers with high positive well-being had a reduced risk of engaging in unhealthy behaviors such as smoking, binge drinking, using drugs, and eating unhealthy foods while transitioning into adulthood.
The study is one of the first focused on the effect of psychological characteristics in teens.
In order to measure positive well-being in adolescence, Hoyt and her team went back to the 1994 data from that specific sample of young people and examined their answers to a series of "well-being" questions. These questions focused on topics that gauged the teens' sense of happiness, enjoyment of life, hopefulness for the future, self-esteem and social acceptance. They used these measures of positive well-being during adolescence (measured in 1994) to predict perceived general health and risky health behaviors in young adulthood (measured in 2001). The researchers controlled the study for health conditions in adolescence, socioeconomic status, symptoms of depression and other known predictors of long-term health.
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