Independent Perspective News

Evidence suggests that happy people live longer. "It's a fact that people who are psychologically healthy live more years than those who suffer pathologies ", says Dr Howard Friedman (http://www.psych.ucr.edu/faculty/Friedman.htm), from the University of Chicago, US. The most recent study on the influence of personality on longevity compares a survey carried out in 1975 in Oxford, Ohio, to a group of 660 people over 50, with another piece of research carried out in 1998. The people interviews almost 30 years ago answered several questions about their attitude toward life and said whether they agreed or not with statements such as "things get worse over the years" or "I'm as happy as I use to be when I was younger".

In 1998, researchers found out which of them were still alive and when the ones gone had died. It turned out that those who saw aging as a "positive experience" live an average 7,5 longer than those who had a dark vision of life. According to experts, optimism has a deeper impact on health than that produced by a controlled reduction of the cholesterol rate or pressure, which, according to several studies, make life about four years longer. Happiness' contribution to longevity also outdoes in years that made by physical exercise, quitting smoking and keeping a healthy weight, which add up to between one and three years of life.

Researchers avoided saying that a good mood is more important for health than exercise or good alimentation, though. But, according to Dr Becca Levy (http://info.med.yale.edu/eph/html/faculty_members/levy.html), a social psychologist from the University of Yale, US, it's truly astonishing who important a psychological characteristic is when it comes to predict how long a life will last. When analyzing the data, Levy and her colleagues took into account the interviewed people's race, gender, socioeconomic situation, physical state, general behavior and degree of loneliness. But even after studying these traits, they concluded that they way people deal with the unavoidable aging has a great correlation with the possibility of living a longer life.

(...)

Now, why do happy and peaceful people live longer? Dr Levy suspects the answer could be related to the energy positive people logically have. "From the studies we've analyzed, it follows that the will to live seems to be a partial mediator, but that doesn't entirely explains why positive people live longer. So there must be something else like, for instance, the way people respond to stress. Old people with a negative view of aging have higher levels of stress". However, not all specialists agree that optimism is a healthy feature. According to a study carried out by psychologist Derek Isaacowitz (http://www.brandeis.edu/departments/psych/isaacowitz.html), from the Brandeis University of the United States, pessimism can be useful at an old age and end up protecting the patient.

According to Dr Isaacowitz, pessimists have fewer chances of getting depressed after the death of a friend or relative, or any other negative experience. Perhaps, at some point, pessimists are better prepared to face the twists of life. Many experts agree that connections between personality and they years one lives are not simple: "It's a mistake to tell people they must be happy to live longer. There isn't really much evidence that's so", Sayd Dr Friedman. Moreover, many psychologists from diverse schools have serious doubts that it's possible for people to change their personality and enhance their longevity rate. "There might be fluctuations but personality is essentially stable", says Dr Maruta.

Psychologist Martin Seligman, from the University of Pennsylvania, US, says what actually is possible is that people exercise to achieve a more optimistic point of view. Every year, he receives a group of new students at college for an "optimism training", bound to help them manage the stress university life entails. And Seligman have found that, at least while they're studying, trained students suffer less than those who don't take the course. The numerous books written by the psychologists -among them "Acquired optimism"- teach that it is possible, at least, to change the way we explain life and doing so in a positive way. Nevertheless, Seligman states that there may be a third variant that makes us be happier and live longer. And he suspects genes.