Good News for Good Guys : Landmark Study Finds That Prudent, Conscientious Children Have Longer Lives

There are martyrs throughout history who would seem to prove the point that the good die young. But an unusual study drawn from one of the most famous research pools in American psychology suggests just the opposite--that good, caring people actually live longer.

Children who were prudent, conscientious and truthful and lacked vanity had 30% less chance of dying in any given year, a team of researchers has found after analyzing seven decades of psychosocial data collected on about 1,200 men and women.

“We expect that someone who takes advantage of others and is boorish and selfish will be the one who will triumph,” said Howard Friedman, a UC Riverside psychology professor who coordinated the 10-year project funded by the National Institute on Aging.

“We didn’t find that at all. In the rush to judgment, it is not true that good guys die young.”

The research by Friedman’s team is the first to demonstrate a relationship between childhood personality and survival, experts in the field say. The study, published in the February issue of the journal American Psychologist, also found that parental divorce and inconsistent marriage patterns are strongly associated with premature death.

The research subjects were participants in the Terman Life Cycle Study, begun in 1921 by Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman. He recruited 1,500 bright California children to participate in his pioneering studies of high-IQ individuals.

Dubbed the “Termites,” these men and women were surveyed every five to 10 years, providing scientists with a rich, reliable storehouse of information about lifelong intellectual and social development. But this unique database had not been used before to study links between behavior and mortality.

Using Terman’s archives, Friedman and his fellow researchers tracked down death certificates for the hundreds of subjects who had died by 1991. Reflecting the general population, the women significantly outlived the men, and the leading causes of death were cardiovascular disease and cancer.

Because the sample--more than 99% white and well-educated--was not representative of the U.S. population, Friedman cautioned that the findings may not necessarily apply to other groups. But because of the selectivity of the pool, he notes in the study, other explanations for poor health, such as poverty and ignorance, were screened out, providing a good basis for focusing on the impact of personality and social stress.

Friedman said the most striking finding was how strongly childhood social dependability or conscientiousness correlated with longer life. Being conscientious seemed to protect against death from injury as well as from heart disease and cancer. The apparent advantages of the trait remained strong even after controlling for unhealthy behaviors such as smoking and drinking.

“So we seem to be getting at a basic aspect of people’s lifelong functioning,” Friedman said. “It’s quite a dramatic effect.”

Children of divorced parents also faced a one-third greater risk of early death than people whose parents remained married until they were 21. Men whose parents split while they were children lived to a predicted median age of 76, compared to 80 for those whose parents stayed together. For women, the corresponding ages at death were 82 and 86.

Unstable marital history among participants in the study before the age of 40 was found to be another significant risk factor. The subjects who had been married more than once had a 40% greater chance of early death than those in stable marriages. So, contrary to folk wisdom, the state of being married in itself does not appear to be a buffer against stress. The risk rate almost doubles for those who were separated or divorced, compared to those who remained married.

The impact of parental divorce and of conscientiousness was more pronounced for men than for women, although the reasons are not clear. Friedman said he hopes to find answers in ongoing studies.

Surprisingly, neither cheerfulness nor sociability were found to enhance life span. The researchers found no evidence that being sociable or extroverted correlated with greater health or longer life. The subjects who were rated optimistic and cheerful and had a sense of humor as children died younger, scoring a 22% greater risk of premature death compared to those who lacked those characteristics.

The cheerful children grew up more likely to smoke, drink and take other risks, but Friedman said those habits do not fully explain their greater likelihood of dying early.

Robert Kaplan, professor of family and preventive medicine at UC San Diego, said the Friedman study breaks new ground by showing the relationship of childhood personality and parental divorce to longevity.

The study plumbs a field of inquiry that only lately has begun to attract the attention Kaplan and other experts say it deserves. Most research has focused on biological variables, such as consumption of fat, which Kaplan says is a poorer predictor of survival than such psychosocial factors as having a spouse.

“There seems to be evidence of a clustering of traits or psychological factors that do seem to have a health impact on longevity, such as trust versus suspiciousness, hostility and depression. Conscientiousness is very much related to those things,” said John Barefoot, an associate professor at the Duke University Behavioral Medicine Research Center.

In a key paper presented last week at a meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society in New Orleans, Barefoot reported that hostility and depression significantly increased the risk of coronary disease and early mortality. He found that the risk of premature death was twice as high if the depressed and hostile subjects had low socioeconomic status. His study was based on several decades of psychological and physical data collected on 730 men and women in a town near Copenhagen, Denmark.

Such findings can help improve the prognosis for patients with chronic disease because they will motivate doctors to look for and alleviate signs of depression, Barefoot said.

Scientists do not know for sure whether a trait such as conscientiousness can be taught or is inherited. However, Margaret Chesney, who teaches epidemiology at the UC San Francisco School of Medicine, said the research by psychologists such as Friedman should bolster efforts in schools to instill it in children.

“There is an important public health message here,” Chesney said. “What is so significant about what Howard (Friedman) is doing is he is helping us understand what is protective (behavior). So much of medicine is ‘thou shalt not.’ It has emphasized negative traits. Howard is pointing the direction to what we should aspire to.”