A healthy mind, a longer life

A healthy mind, a longer life: Can the right attitude and personality help you live longer? Psychologists are trying to find out.
[10 November 2006 - Monitor on Psychology - APA] ... In the late 1990s, Yale University psychologist Becca Levy, PhD, realized that the aging-attitudes questions from the Ohio study could help her answer a research question she’d begun to consider: Could people’s attitudes toward aging influence how long they lived? Levy collected death records to find out whether each participant was still alive or the age at which they had died. When she matched up the records with the people’s survey answers, she found that people with more positive views of their own aging lived, on average, 7.6 years longer than people with more negative views. This significant survival advantage remained after controlling for other relevant factors. More