Is There a Longevity Personality?

Why do some people live to be older than others? You know the standard explanations: keeping an abstemious diet; engaging in regular exercise; and, if you're an unusual Frenchwoman, smoking cigarettes until you are 117 years old.

A new study in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society looked at this question by examining the personality traits of 246 children of people who had lived to be at least 100.

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The study shows that those who live the longest are more outgoing, more active and less neurotic than other people. Long-living women are also more likely to be empathetic and cooperative than women with a normal life span. These findings comport with what you would expect from evolutionary theory: those who are extroverted enough to make friends and help others are those who are going to be able to gather enough resources to make it through tough times.

Interestingly, however, other traits that you might consider advantageous had no impact in this study on whether participants were likely to live longer. Those who were more self-disciplined, for instance, were no more likely to live to be very old (which might explain the long life of the smoking French lady). Also, being open to new ideas had no relationship to long life, which might explain all those cantankerous old people who are fixed in their ways.