Personality and psychosocial predictors of life-span mortality risk

摘要

There is little doubt that personality and psychosocial factors play a role in the etiology and progression of disease; what remain murky are the causal pathways through which these variables exert their influence, Lewis Terman began, in the early 1920s, to gather data on a group of more than 1500 bright boys and girls in CA, USA. Data collection has continued ever since, at approximately 5- to 10-year intervals, and this longitudinal data set is now being used by social scientists to untangle the complex causal web linking personality factors to physical health. Throughout the first decade of our ongoing study of this unique data set, psychosocial and personality variables have consistently emerged as key predictors of premature mortality risk with the predictive power of conscientiousness being particularly robust and consistent. Personality and psychosocial factors are associated with certain health-related behaviors in this sample, but these behaviors cannot explain the observed link between personalityand the risk for earlier mortality.