Adolescents' personality traits are related to the risk of death, whatever their cause, 50 years later

Energy, calm, empathy, maturity and intellectual curiosity can be protective, while impulsivity can affect the chances of longevity, the results indicate.

Previous research suggests that mid-life personality traits can predict the likelihood of dying sooner or later. But it is not clear if the potential seeds of this association could go back even further, as has already been suggested for IQ and family history.

To further explore this issue, the researchers drew on the data collected for the Project Talent Study, a nationally representative sample of 5% (1226) of all US high schools in 1960.

Some 377,016 students, most of them between the age of 13 (grade 9) and 18 (grade 12), had a battery of tests and psychological questionnaires for two days.

The information sought included the level of education and job titles of parents, income, housing and property, as well as 10 personality traits, as measured by the inventory of project personalities ( Talent Personality Inventory, PTPI) and deemed important for the success of a lifetime.

These were the calm; social sensitivity (empathy and sensitivity to others' feelings); impulsiveness; leadership (responsibility and self-determination); force (energy provision); self-confidence; order (preference for organization and order); sociability (outgoing provision); culture (intellectual curiosity); and mature personality (goal-oriented).

These traits were subsequently matched with the current "Big 5" dimensions used to describe personality: amenity; extroversion; consciousness; open-mindedness; and neuroticism.

The final analysis covered 26,845 participants from 1171 of the initial schools for which complete data was available and whose records were tracked through the national index of deaths until 2009.

During the surveillance period, which averaged nearly 48 years, just over 13% of participants died.

The analysis revealed that a higher score for energy, empathy, calmness, cleanliness, intellectual curiosity and maturity, as well as a lower score for impulsivity, in adolescents, were associated with a lower relative risk of all-cause death over the next fifty years.

Taking into account ethnicity and family history has had little effect on the associations observed between personality traits and survival.

And when all potentially influential factors were taken into account, the analysis showed that every change of one point (relative to the expected average) of the personality trait score was associated with increases or decreases decreases in relative risk of death by 5 to 7% compared to the average. 48 year monitoring period.

This is an observational study that, as such, does not establish the cause, to which the sample was not entirely randomly selected, nor the available ethnicity data. for all participants. And the researchers did not examine the specific causes of death.

Nevertheless, the results are based on large numbers, nearly half a century of follow-up and a vast inventory of personality traits, the researchers said.

"In a sense, the search for personality-mortality associations in adolescence is surprising because the years of high school are widely perceived as a period of personality development and malleability," commented they.

And they recognize, "Personality change over the course of life is a complex issue, with considerable individual variability."

But they suggest that longevity of the personality may be related in different ways to the adoption of unhealthy behaviors and the long-term physiological impact of psychological factors on the body's immune, hormonal and cardiovascular systems.

"Inappropriate traits also seem to limit later levels of education, hinder career advancement in the workplace, and increase the risk of divorce – social and socio-economic factors related to later death," they point out. .