An exploratory cross-national analysis of the childhood predictors of inner peace in the Global Flourishing Study

Great efforts have been expended studying how people's childhood affects their life in adulthood. 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 regarded as 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 cross-sectional wave 1 data from the most ambitious longitudinal 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 exploratory paper looks at 13 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, relative to "good", ranging from 0.93 for "poor" to 1.07 for "excellent". Second, do associations vary by country, with the effect of poor self-rated health spanning 0.37 in Turkey to 1.19 in Nigeria. 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 an unmeasured confounder association Risk Ratio of 1.36 with inner peace. These results shed valuable new light on the long-term causal dynamics of this overlooked but important topic.