Our personality traits can affect many of the choices we make and alter different aspects of our lives. A new study now suggests that an individual’s personality traits in adolescence can help predict longevity.
Personality traits change and adapt throughout life and this can happen due to several factors that, in themselves, are related to the risk of mortality.
For this reason, a team of researchers from the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York, the American Research Institute in Washington DC and the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana (USA), decided to analyze personality traits during adolescence, to see if these could be used as predictors of mortality risk instead.
Researchers analyzed the personality traits of thousands of high school students in 1960 and then looked for links between these traits and the individual’s lifespan. The results have been published in The BMJ.
Positive traits = longer lives?
The experts worked with data collected through the Project Talent Study, a national study of high school students based in the United States.
For the current study, the researchers analyzed data from 1,226 US high schools in 1960, which made up about 5% of all US high schools at the time. In total, they had access to data from 377,016 students who were between the ages of 13 and 18 at the start of the study, and who had completed numerous psychological tests and questionnaires over a period of 2 days, or 4½ days.
Some of this data included information on the educational background of the students ‘parents, in addition to their jobs, income … In addition, the team had details of the students’ personality traits.
At the time, the study evaluated 10 personality traits that appeared to be crucial for the development and success of adolescents : calm, social sensitivity (empathy), impulsiveness, leadership (determined by a sense of responsibility and self-determination. ), vigor (being energetic), self-confidence, orderliness, sociability, culture (or sense of curiosity), and mature personality (goal-oriented).
The current researchers for the present study narrowed the list of key personality traits to five: likeability, extraversion, conscientiousness, outspokenness, and neuroticism.
For the final analysis, they took into account the data of 26,845 participants from 1,171 schools. These participants also had records available through the National Death Index up to 2009.
During an average follow-up period of 48 years, 13.12% of these participants died.
According to their analysis, individuals who scored high on calm, social sensitivity (empathy), orderliness, curiosity, and maturity, but low impulsivity, appeared to have a lower relative risk of death from all causes across the board. the world in a period of 48 years.
Factors such as ethnicity and family did not have a significant impact on this association.
Reasons
However, the researchers note that associations between certain personality traits and longevity do not necessarily indicate a cause-and-effect relationship, as the study was observational.
In addition, they caution that they did not choose the population sample completely at random, that they did not have information about the ethnic origin of the participants, and that they did not distinguish the causes of death.
All of these limitations may have impacted the study results. Still, the researchers argue that the strengths of their findings lie in the fact that they analyzed such a vast amount of data that it spanned nearly 50 years.
“Tracking personality-mortality associations in adolescence is surprising because the high school years are viewed as a time of personality development and malleability,” the authors emphasize. “Personality change throughout the life course is a complex issue, with considerable individual variability ,” they add.
“Maladaptive traits also appear to limit later educational attainment, hinder midlife occupational advancement, and increase the risk of divorce, social and socioeconomic factors related to later death,” the experts conclude.
Reference: High school personality traits and 48-year all-cause mortality risk: results from a national sample of 26 845 baby boomers. BMJ JOURNALS 2018 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/jech-2018-211076
