Happiness Associated With Longer Life

Science:

Happy people don’t just enjoy life; they’re likely to live longer, too. A new study has found that those in better moods were 35% less likely to die in the next 5 years when taking their life situations into account.

The traditional way to measure a person’s happiness is to ask them about it. But over the past few decades, psychologist and epidemiologist Andrew Steptoe of University College London (UCL) says, scientists have realized that those measures aren’t reliable. It’s not clear whether they “assess how they’re actually feeling or how they remember feeling,” he says. When answering, people are more likely to count their blessings and compare their experience with the lives of others.

The English Longitudinal Study of Ageing tried to get more specific. It has followed more than 11,000 people age 50 and older since 2002. In 2004, about 4700 of them collected saliva samples four times in one day and, at those same times, rated how happy, excited, content, worried, anxious, and fearful they felt. The saliva samples are still awaiting analysis for stress hormones, but Steptoe and his UCL colleague Jane Wardle publish findings today on the links between mood and mortality in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .

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