Category: Personality

This personality trait is linked to living almost 8 years longer on average.

Optimists are most likely to hold positive beliefs about aging. Critically, optimists believe they can control their lives and make improvements. This means that believing in a healthy, engaged old age is a self-fulfilling prophecy — people with these views tend to experience better health and are more active and social. Ms Shelbie Turner, the study’s first author, said:

“How we think about who we’re going to be in old age is very predictive of exactly how we will be.”

Studies have found that people who imagine themselves more positively at age 50 tend to enjoy better health 40 years later. They are less likely to suffer a heart attack, have better memory, a greater will to live and are less likely to die prematurely. Professor Karen Hooker, study co-author, said:

“Previous research has shown that people who have positive views of aging at 50 live 7.5 years longer, on average, than people who don’t.”

For the study, 244 people were tested for their optimistic traits and for how they saw themselves in the future. Each person listed two ‘hoped-for’ future selves and two ‘feared’ future selves. For example, participants feared becoming chronically ill and living with pain, while hoping to remain healthy and active. The results revealed that optimistic people held more positive views about aging.

Overcoming ageist stereotypes

Older people are often stereotyped as suffering memory problems, having difficulty exercising and being poor drivers. Professor Hooker said:

“Kids as young as 4 years old already have negative stereotypes about old people. Then, of course, if you’re lucky enough to live to old age, they eventually apply to you.”

Even older people sometimes reinforce these stereotypes themselves in the way they behave and think about aging. Professor Hooker said:

“People need to realize that some of the negative health consequences in later life might not be biologically driven. The mind and the body are all interwoven. If you believe these bad things are going to happen, over time that can erode people’s willingness or maybe even eventually their ability to engage in those health behaviors that are going to keep them as healthy as they can be.”

According to Professor Hooker, greater interaction between younger and older generations could help foster more positive views of aging:

“The more you’re around older people, the more you realize that it’s not all bad. Older people can do some things better than young people do. Increasing opportunities for intergenerational relationships is one way we can make people more optimistic about aging.”

Increase your optimism

People naturally become more optimistic with age, studies have found. However, exercises such as visualising your ‘best possible self‘ have been shown to increase optimism in the short-term. Visualising your best possible self may sound like an exercise in fantasy but, crucially, it has to be realistic. Carrying out this exercise typically involves imagining your life in the future, but a future where everything that could go well has gone well. In this imagined future, you have achieved the realistic goals you set for yourself. Then, to help reinforce the exercise, you write down a description of your best possible self. The study was published in the The International Journal of Aging and Human Development (Turner & Hooker, 2020).

The personality traits that help cadets graduate from the US Military Academy at West Point.

Grit and intelligence are two personality factors vital for success.

Grit is the trait of perseverance and passion that keeps people working towards long-term goals.

While higher intelligence helps people succeed at certain activities, it may be grit that really propels people over the line.

The conclusions come from a study of over 11,258 cadets entering the US Military Academy at West Point.

Professor Angela Duckworth, the study’s first author, said:

“I was looking for a context in which people might be quitting too early.

There’s such a thing as quitting at the right time.

But there’s also such a thing as quitting on a bad day when you’re discouraged and maybe shouldn’t be making such a big decision.”

All cadets entering the Academy in nine successive years completed measures of grit, plus the researchers had access to cognitive scores and tests of physical abilities.

Professor Duckworth said:

“We accumulated all this data in part so we could answer more definitively the question of whether grit predicted success outcomes.

We now have more confidence in our original conclusions.

At the same time, we wanted to explore where, perhaps, grit wasn’t the most important factor.”

The results showed that the trait of grit was most useful to cadets during ‘Beast Barracks’, a six-week initiation during which 3 percent of cadets drop out.

Professor Duckworth said:

“The grittier you are, the less likely you are to drop out during that very discouraging time.”

In classroom activities it was intelligence that mattered most.

To graduate from West Point, though, a combination of grit and physical ability was more important than cognitive abilities.

Professor Duckworth said:

“This work shows us that grit is not the only determinant of success.

Yes, it’s very important, helping people stick with things when they’re hard, but it’s not the best predictor of every aspect of success.”

Fascinatingly, the higher cadets’ cognitive abilities, the lower their grit.

Smarter people seem to have less determination to overcome the odds, perhaps because they face fewer challenges.

Related

• 10 Powerful Ways Conscientiousness Shapes Your Mind, Body & Behaviour (P)

The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Duckworth et al., 2019).

These two personality traits are linked to having a stronger immune system.

People with a positive and uninhibited personality tend to have a stronger immune system.

People with stable emotions who are extraverted and outgoing also tend to show lower immune system activation, suggesting better overall health.

Extraverted people tend to focus on the world around them and are happiest when socially engaged and active.

Two signs that a person has a positive and outgoing personality are strongly disagreeing with both the following statements:

• “I often find myself worrying about something.”
• “I would rather keep people at a distance.”

The conclusions come partly from a study which found that people who are extraverted and have stable emotions are at lower risk of dying from peripheral artery disease.

By contrast, a negative and inhibited personality is linked to a weaker immune system.

This type of negative personality is sometimes known as ‘type D’, where D stands for distressed.

The study’s authors explain:

“Preliminary evidence suggests that personality traits such as hostility may also be associated with the severity and progression of atherosclerosis [plaque buildup] in patients with PAD.

Another potential individual risk factor in this context is the distressed personality type (type D).

Type D refers to the joint tendency to experience negative emotions and to inhibit self-expression in social interaction.”

The researchers tracked 184 patients with peripheral artery disease.

The results showed that people with a type D personality were at higher risk of dying.

A type D personality is characterised by neuroticism and introversion.

One of the reasons for the link may be, the authors write:

“…inadequate self-management of chronic disease is a potential behavioral mechanism that may explain the relation between type D personality and poor prognosis in cardiovascular disease.”

The study was published in the journal The Archives of Surgery (Aquarius et al., 2009).

These two personality types choose high-status cars.

Two different personality types are attracted to driving a high-status cars, like an Audi, Mercedes or BMW.

The first group fits a familiar stereotype: argumentative, disagreeable, and unempathetic men.

The second type, though, is a conscientious man or woman: someone who wants others to know they are respectable, reliable and well-organised.

Those are the results of a study inspired by the common observation that drivers of high-status cars are more likely to break traffic regulations.

Professor Jan-Erik Lönnqvist, the study’s lead author, was inspired by his own observations on the road:

“I had noticed that the ones most likely to run a red light, not give way to pedestrians and generally drive recklessly and too fast were often the ones driving fast German cars.”

The fast and the reckless

Indeed, studies have shown that people driving more expensive cars are more likely to break the rules.

Wealth, psychologists have argued, has a corrupting effect on people, making them less law-abiding.

That may be so, but Professor Lönnqvist and colleagues thought the link could be partly explained by personality.

To test this, the researchers surveyed 1,892 car owners in Finland, asking about their cars, wealth and consumption habits.

The results revealed that men who are disagreeable, argumentative and stubborn are more likely to own a high-status car.

Professor Lönnqvist said:

“These personality traits explain the desire to own high-status products, and the same traits also explain why such people break traffic regulations more frequently than others.”

While disagreeable men showed the strongest link to luxury vehicles, Professor Lönnqvist noted a broader trend:

“But we also found that those whose personality was deemed more disagreeable were more drawn to high-status cars.

These are people who often see themselves as superior and are keen to display this to others.”

A second, less obvious group that was attracted to high-status cars was men and women high in conscientiousness.

Conscientious people tend to be well-organised, reliable, ambitious and respectable.

Professor Lönnqvist said:

“The link is presumably explained by the importance they attach to high quality.

All makes of car have a specific image, and by driving a reliable car they are sending out the message that they themselves are reliable.”

One puzzle was why high-status cars do not particularly appeal to self-centred women.

Professor Lönnqvist thinks one possibility is that women do not see cars as significant status symbols as do men.

Related

• 10 Powerful Ways Conscientiousness Shapes Your Mind, Body & Behaviour (P)

The study was published in the International Journal of Psychology (Lönnqvist et al., 2019).