Conscientiousness and longevity

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There is an interesting study that went up on PubMed a few days ago. the abstract reads …

Objective: Conscientious individuals tend to experience a number of health benefits, not the least of which being greater longevity. However, it remains an open question as to why this link with longevity occurs. The current study tested two possible mediators (physical health and cognitive functioning) of the link between conscientiousness and longevity.

Method: We tested these mediators using a 10-year longitudinal sample (N = 512), a subset of the long-running Health and Retirement Study of aging adults. Measures included an adjective-rating measure of conscientiousness, self-reported health conditions, and three measures of cognitive functioning (word recall, delayed recall, and vocabulary) included in the 1996 wave of the HRS study.

Results: Our results found that conscientiousness significantly predicted greater longevity, even in a model including the two proposed mediator variables, gender, age, and years of education. Moreover, cognitive functioning appears to partially mediate this relationship.

Conclusions: This study replicates previous research showing that conscientious individuals tend to lead longer lives, and provides further insight into why this effect occurs. In addition, it underscores the importance of measurement considerations.

The abstract on PubMed can be found here.

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The deal we dare not turn down

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Sometimes it is simply appropriate to, coffee shop style, slap an article down and announce, “You must read this”. Well, this is one of those occasions, because Johann Hari says it far better than I ever could …

Sometimes, there are hinge-points in human history -moments when we have to choose between an exuberant descent into lunacy, and a still, sober voice offering us a sane way out. Usually, we can only see them when we look back from a distance. In 1793, the great democrat Thomas Paine said the French Revolution shouldn’t betray its principles by killing the King, because it would trigger an orgy of blood-letting that would eventually drown them all. They threw him in jail. In 1919, the great economist John Maynard Keynes said the European powers shouldn’t humiliate Germany, because it would catalyze extreme nationalism and produce another world war. They ignored him. In 1953, a handful of US President Dwight Eisenhower’s advisors urged him not to destroy Iranian democracy and kidnap its Prime Minister, because it would have a reactionary ripple-effect that lasted decades. They refused to listen.

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Comment Policy

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I’m off on a slightly different tack today, and am asking you, the reader, a question.

In essence … if you are a blogger, then what should the policy be regarding comments?

It should of course be very obvious, if something is not offensive, abusive, illegal, or spam then it should stay, so perhaps the real challenge is to come to terms with how you define those. Lets take a quick look at some:

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Keeping us in Ignorance? – “No”

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Nick Cohen sums it all up very nicely when he writes in Sunday’s Guardian … When censors try to restrict debate, democratic peoples must learn to reply with two words: that’s tough. “You want to use violence to stop criticism of religions that claim supernatural dominion over men’s minds and women’s bodies – that’s tough. … Read more

Throwing some light on “Dark Energy”

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Exciting news from the BBC folks, we have some new information about “Dark matter”, they report …

First results from a major astronomical survey using a cutting-edge technique appear to have confirmed the existence of mysterious dark energy.

Dark energy makes up some 74% of the Universe and its existence would explain why the Universe appears to be expanding at an accelerating rate.

The finding was based on studies of more than 200,000 galaxies.

Scientists used two separate kinds of observation to provide an independent check on previous dark energy results.

Two papers by an international team of researchers have been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal.

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