Category: Personality

Certain personality traits predict how long you will live.

People who are persistent and careful live the longest lives.

Surprisingly, to live a long life you don’t need to be particularly happy.

In fact, the people you might expect to live longest — cheerful, happy-go-lucky types — actually have the shortest lives.

The reason is that cheerful, laid-back people tend to be more careless about their health.

Persistent and conscientious people, though, get that check-up and are more committed to their work.

The conclusions come from a study that originally included 1,500 smart children.

They were followed from when they were 10-years-old in 1921.

Professor Howard S. Friedman, the study’s first author, said:

“Probably our most amazing finding was that personality characteristics and social relations from childhood can predict one’s risk of dying decades later.”

Namely, being conscientious predicted a long life, explained Professor Leslie R. Martin, study co-author:

“…participants who were the most cheerful and had the best sense of humor as kids lived shorter lives, on average, than those who were less cheerful and joking.

It was the most prudent and persistent individuals who stayed healthiest and lived the longest.”

The study also found that people who were the most committed to their jobs lived the longest.

Productive people lived longer than their more laid-back peers.

Professor Friedman said:

“…we found that as a general life-orientation, too much of a sense that ‘everything will be just fine’ can be dangerous because it can lead one to be careless about things that are important to health and long life.

Prudence and persistence, however, led to a lot of important benefits for many years.

It turns out that happiness is not a root cause of good health.

Instead, happiness and health go together because they have common roots.”

Some other pointers for a long life from the study included:

• Help others: it can lengthen your life.
• Avoid getting divorced if you are a man. Women, though, do just as well without their husbands.
• Don’t start formal schooling too soon — early play is important.
• Do work hard and stay committed to what you do.

It’s never too late to make a change, said Professor Martin:

“Thinking of making changes as taking ‘steps’ is a great strategy.

You can’t change major things about yourself overnight.

But making small changes, and repeating those steps, can eventually create that path to longer life.”

The research was published in The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight Decade Study (Friedman & Martin, 2011).

Psychopaths, narcissists, egoists, sadists and other nasty people all share one dark personality trait.

A ‘dark core’ personality is shared by every nasty person.

Whether they are psychopaths, narcissists, egoists, sadists or spiteful people, they all share the same tendency to put themselves before others in the worst possible way.

Nine dark personality types all turned out to have this core of callous selfishness, involving total disregard for the rights of others.

However, psychopaths, narcissist, sadists and the rest express their dark core in slightly different ways.

All, though, justify their amoral behaviours to themselves to avoid feeling guilty about them.

Dr Ingo Zettler, study co-author, explains the D-factor:

“…the dark aspects of human personality have a common denominator, which means that — similar to intelligence — one can say that they are all an expression of the same dispositional tendency.

For example, in a given person, the D-factor can mostly manifest itself as narcissism, psychopathy or one of the other dark traits, or a combination of these.

But with our mapping of the common denominator of the various dark personality traits, one can simply ascertain that the person has a high D-factor.

This is because the D-factor indicates how likely a person is to engage in behaviour associated with one or more of these dark traits.”

The results come from a series of studies of over 2,500 people.

All were asked whether they agreed with statements like:

• “It is sometimes worth a little suffering on my part to see others receive the punishment they deserve.”
• “I know that I am special because everyone keeps telling me so.”

The study explored the following nine dark personality factors:

1. Egoism
2. Machiavellianism
3. Moral disengagement
4. Narcissism
5. Psychological entitlement
6. Psychopathy
7. Sadism
8. Self-interest
9. Spitefulness

The results showed that at their core, each of the dark personality factors had much in common.

People who have the dark core factor are also likely to have the behaviours of multiple dark personality types.

People with this dark factor are all around us, said Dr Zettler:

“We see it, for example, in cases of extreme violence, or rule-breaking, lying, and deception in the corporate or public sectors.

Here, knowledge about a person’s D-factor may be a useful tool, for example to assess the likelihood that the person will reoffend or engage in more harmful behaviour.”

The study was published in the journal Psychological Review (Moshagen et al., 2018).

When a perfectionist slips up, they criticise themselves too much and can experience burnout and depression.

Being self-compassionate is one of the best remedies for a perfectionist personality.

Learning self-acceptance helps protect the type of perfectionists who are highly self-critical from depression.

Some perfectionists are very worried about making mistakes and push themselves too hard to succeed.

When a perfectionist slips up, they criticise themselves too much and can experience burnout and depression.

However, perfectionists who are self-compassionate and self-accepting are less likely to get depressed.

The conclusion comes from a study of 541 adolescents and 515 adults.

All were given tests of perfectionism, depression and self-compassion.

Dr Madeleine Ferrari, the study’s first author, explained the results:

“Self-compassion, the practice of self-kindness, consistently reduces the strength of the relationship between maladaptive perfectionism and depression for both adolescents and adults.”

The study’s authors explain how self-compassion is helpful:

“…self-compassion is ‘a useful emotion regulation strategy, in which painful or distressing feelings are not avoided but are instead held in awareness with kindness, understanding, and a sense of shared humanity’.

Thus, instead of avoiding social comparisons or overcompensating for negative feelings about the self through futile attempts to attain a higher social rank, the cultivation of self-compassion might help individuals to unconditionally accept ones’ failings.”

The study was published in the journal PLoS ONE (Ferrari et al., 2018).

This is one of the best psychological predictors of how much someone will earn.

People with stronger self-control have higher salaries.

It is one of the best psychological predictors of how much someone will earn.

The conclusions come from a study of over 2,500 people who completed tests of ‘delay discounting’.

Delay discounting is the ability to give up a small reward now to get a bigger one later.

It’s like investing money instead of spending it right away — you get more later if you can resist buying a new car now.

Previous studies using the famous ‘marshmallow test‘ have shown that children with greater self-control go on to earn higher salaries as adults.

The new study revealed that occupation and education were naturally the best predictors of salary — after this came location and gender.

However, after these came delay discounting, ahead of age, race, ethnicity or height.

Dr William Hampton, the study’s lead author, said:

“if you want your child to grow up to earn a good salary, consider instilling in them the importance of passing on smaller, immediate rewards in favor of larger ones that they have to wait for.

This is probably easier said than done, as very few people naturally enjoy waiting, but our results suggest that those who develop the ability to delay gratification are likely investing in their own earning potential.”

The study used machine learning to rank income predictors, Dr Hampton explained:

“All sorts of things predict income.

We knew that this behavioral variable, delay discounting, was also predictive — but we were really curious how it would stack up against more common-sense predictors like education and age.

Using machine learning, our study was the first to create a validated rank ordering of age, occupation, education, geographic location, gender, race, ethnicity, height, age and delay discounting in income prediction.”

The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology (Hampton et al., 2018).

The less the ‘default network’ is activated, the less pain people felt, the study showed.

People who are more mindful feel less pain.

Brain scans showed that people who stay in the moment without judging it have lower activation in areas linked to the self and emotions.

Mindful people do not focus so heavily on the experience of pain, rather they allow it to flow away from them.

Acceptance may be key to the benefits of mindfulness, previous research suggests.

Dr Fadel Zeidan, the study’s first author, explained:

“Mindfulness is related to being aware of the present moment without too much emotional reaction or judgment.

We now know that some people are more mindful than others, and those people seemingly feel less pain.”

For the study, people were given heat stimulation while their brains were scanned.

People who were more mindful had lower activation in two critical areas: the posterior cingulate cortex and the medial prefrontal cortex.

Together these form part of what psychologists call ‘the default network’.

Dr Zeidan explained its relevance:

“As soon as you start performing a task, the connection between these two brain regions in the default mode network disengages and the brain allocates information and processes to other neural areas

Default mode deactivates whenever you are performing any kind of task, such as reading or writing.

Default mode network is reactivated whenever the individual stops performing a task and reverts to self-related thoughts, feelings and emotions.

The results from our study showed that mindful individuals are seemingly less caught up in the experience of pain, which was associated with lower pain reports.”

The more the ‘default network’ is activated, the more pain people felt, the study showed.

Dr Zeidan said:

“Now we have some new ammunition to target this brain region in the development of effective pain therapies.

Importantly this work shows that we should consider one’s level of mindfulness when calculating why and how one feels less or more pain.

Based on our earlier research, we know we can increase mindfulness through relatively short periods of mindfulness meditation training, so this may prove to be an effective way to provide pain relief for the millions of people suffering from chronic pain.”

Related

• 7 Psychological Ways Your Brain Can Control Pain — Without Medication (P)

The study was published in the journal PAIN (Zeidan et al., 2018).

People live longer in countries where this trait is more common.

Being generous leads to a longer life.

People who share more of their resources with others enjoy higher life expectancy.

Scientists analysing people’s generosity across different societies found a linear relationship with average life expectancy.

In other words, the more people shared, the longer they lived.

People in France and Japan, for example, share over two-thirds of their lifetime income with others and both countries have the lowest mortality rates.

In comparison, people in China and Turkey share less than half their income and their risk of dying in the coming year is doubled.

Some countries, though, did not follow the overall pattern.

People in the US and the UK also shared less than half of their annual income, but their risk of dying is closer to more generous countries, like France and Japan.

Australia is another outlier, with people being even less generous than the US and the UK, but living longer.

The data come from 34 countries on six continents.

The amount that people earned was compared with the amount that they gave to others.

Dr Fanny Kluge, study co-author, said:

“What is new about our study is that for the first time we have combined transfer payments from state and family and evaluated the effect.”

The results showed that societies in Western Europe tend to share a lot of their resources and they also live longer.

Countries in sub-Saharan Africa like Senegal had the lowest rates of sharing and the highest mortality rates.

Despite being richer than other African nations, South Africans share little of their resources and also die earlier.

Dr Kluge said:

“Our analyses suggest that redistribution influences the mortality rate of a country, regardless of the per capita gross domestic product.”

Generosity can be individual or societal — both are linked to a boost in longevity, said Dr Kluge:

“What I find particularly interesting is that the relationship between generosity and lifetime income that we described does not depend on whether the benefits come from the state or from the wider family.”

The study was published in the journal PNAS (Vogt et al., 2020).