Category: Personality

They died an average of two years earlier.

People who are very pessimistic about the future are at a greater risk of dying earlier, a study finds.

Pessimists, the study found, died an average of two years earlier than their less pessimistic peers.

Highly pessimistic people, though, make up less than 10 percent of the population.

Dr John Whitfield, the study’s first author, said:

“We found people who were strongly pessimistic about the future were more likely to die earlier from cardiovascular diseases and other causes of death, but not from cancer.

Optimism scores on the other hand did not show a significant relationship with death, either positive or negative.

Less than nine percent of respondents identified as being strongly pessimistic.

There were no significant differences in optimism or pessimism between men and women.

On average, an individual’s level of either optimism or pessimism increased with age.

We also found depression did not appear to account for the association between pessimism and mortality.”

The study included almost 3,000 people who completed tests of optimism and pessimism.

Dr Whitfield believes that optimism and pessimism are not direct opposites:

“The key feature of our results is that we used two separate scales to measure pessimism and optimism and their association with all causes of death.

That is how we discovered that while strong pessimism was linked with earlier death, those who scored highly on the optimism scale did not have a greater than average life expectancy.

We think it’s unlikely that the disease caused the pessimism because we did not find that people who died from cancer had registered a strong pessimism score in their tests.

If illness was leading to higher pessimism scores, it should have applied to cancers as well as to cardiovascular disease.”

It may be beneficial to the health of the highly pessimistic to learn to change their personality, said Dr Whitfield:

“Understanding that our long term health can be influenced by whether we’re a cup-half-full or cup-half-empty kind of person might be the prompt we need to try to change the way we face the world, and try to reduce negativity, even in really difficult circumstances.”

The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports (Whitfield et al., 2020).

One trait can help protect you from anxiety and depression.

People with stable emotions are at a lower risk of developing anxiety and depression, research finds.

Emotional stability is linked to being better at dealing with stress and minor frustrations.

People who are emotionally stable usually find it easier to control their urges and are mostly unselfconscious.

On top of this, people with stable emotions tend to live longer, perhaps because it leads to a healthier lifestyle.

In contrast, being neurotic — the opposite of emotional stability — is linked to less happiness in life.

Unfortunately, the personality trait can lead to a shorter lifespan.

Part of the reason may be that worriers tend to self-medicate with alcohol, cigarettes and other unhealthy habits.

The conclusions come from a study of 1,788 men who were followed over 30 years.

The results showed that neurotic people were more likely to smoke and this was linked to higher mortality.

Professor Daniel K. Mroczek, the study’s first author, said:

“Research shows that higher levels of neuroticism can lead to earlier mortality, and we wanted to know why.

We found that having worrying tendencies or being the kind of person who stresses easily is likely to lead to bad behaviors like smoking and, therefore, raise the mortality rate.

This work is a reminder that high levels of some personality traits can be hazardous to one’s physical health.”

Reducing neuroticism

It is possible to change a neurotic personality, though, the results of 207 separate studies have found.

People become significantly less neurotic after undergoing therapy.

After only three months of treatment, people’s emotional stability had improved by half as much as it would over their entire adulthood.

After having psychotherapy and/or taking medication, people were also slightly more extraverted.

Both reduced neuroticism and increased extraversion were maintained in the long-term.

The study was published in the Journal of Research in Personality (Mroczek et al., 2009).

The traits that people find hardest (and easiest) to spot in themselves.

People are worst at judging their own levels of intelligence, attractiveness and creativity, research finds.

However, they are good at judging their own levels of anxiety and sadness.

The reason is that people are good at judging internal feelings because they have direct access to them.

However, people are worse at evaluating themselves in comparison to others.

The research underlines that we are not always at our best when judging ourselves.

Dr Simine Vazire, the study’s author, said:

“I think that it’s important to really question this knee-jerk reaction that we are our own best experts.

Personality is not who you think you are, it’s who you are.

Some people think by definition that we are the experts on our personality because we get to write the story, but personality is not the story — it’s the reality.

So, you do get to write your own story about how you think you are, and what you tell people about yourself, but there still is reality out there, and, guess what?

Other people are going to see the reality, regardless of what story you believe.”

We leave traces of our personality all around us, said Dr Vazire:

“Everything you touch you leave a mark of your personality.

You leave traces unintentionally.

You give off hints of your personality that you don’t even see yourself.”

For the study, 165 people were given tests of personality, intelligence and of how they reacted to various social situations.

The results showed that people were best at judging their own levels of anxiety.

Dr Vazire said:

“You probably know pretty well your anxiety level, whereas others might not be in the position to judge that because, after all, you can mask your inner feelings.

Others, though, are often better than the self in things that deal with overt behavior.”

Where people had difficulties, though, was in judging desirable personality traits in themselves, such as attractiveness, intelligence and creativity:

“…there is so much at stake, meaning your life is going to be so much different if you are intelligent or not intelligent, attractive or not.

Everybody wants to be seen as intelligent and attractive, but these desirable traits we’re not going to judge accurately in ourselves.”

Dr Vazire explained why these traits are so hard to judge in ourselves:

“We look in the mirror all the time, yet that’s not the same as looking at a photo of someone else.

If we spent as much time looking at photos of others as we do ourselves we’d form a much more confident and clear impression of the other’s attractiveness than we would have of our own.

Yet after looking in the mirror for five minutes we’re still left wondering, ‘Am I attractive or not?’ And still have no clue.

And it’s not the case that we all assume that we’re beautiful, right?”

The study was published in the  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Vazire, 2010).