They died an average of two years earlier.
People who are very pessimistic about the future are at a greater risk of dying earlier, a study finds.
Pessimists, the study found, died an average of two years earlier than their less pessimistic peers.
Highly pessimistic people, though, make up less than 10 percent of the population.
Dr John Whitfield, the study’s first author, said:
“We found people who were strongly pessimistic about the future were more likely to die earlier from cardiovascular diseases and other causes of death, but not from cancer.
Optimism scores on the other hand did not show a significant relationship with death, either positive or negative.
Less than nine percent of respondents identified as being strongly pessimistic.
There were no significant differences in optimism or pessimism between men and women.
On average, an individual’s level of either optimism or pessimism increased with age.
We also found depression did not appear to account for the association between pessimism and mortality.”
The study included almost 3,000 people who completed tests of optimism and pessimism.
Dr Whitfield believes that optimism and pessimism are not direct opposites:
“The key feature of our results is that we used two separate scales to measure pessimism and optimism and their association with all causes of death.
That is how we discovered that while strong pessimism was linked with earlier death, those who scored highly on the optimism scale did not have a greater than average life expectancy.
We think it’s unlikely that the disease caused the pessimism because we did not find that people who died from cancer had registered a strong pessimism score in their tests.
If illness was leading to higher pessimism scores, it should have applied to cancers as well as to cardiovascular disease.”
It may be beneficial to the health of the highly pessimistic to learn to change their personality, said Dr Whitfield:
“Understanding that our long term health can be influenced by whether we’re a cup-half-full or cup-half-empty kind of person might be the prompt we need to try to change the way we face the world, and try to reduce negativity, even in really difficult circumstances.”
The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports (Whitfield et al., 2020).
