Why do some people live to be older than others You know the standard explanations: keeping a moderate diet, engaging in regular exercise, etc. But what effect does your personality have on yourlongevity(长寿) Do some kinds of personalities lead to longer lives A new study in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society looked at this question by examining the personality characteristics of 246 children of people who had lived to be at least 100.The study shows that those living the longest are more outgoing, more active and lessneurotic(神经质的) than other people. Long-living women are also more likely to be sympathetic and cooperative than women with a normal life span. These findings are in agreement with what you would expect from the evolutionary theory: those who like to make friends and help others can gather enough resources to make it through tough times.Interestingly, however, other characteristics that you might consider advantageous had no impact on whether study participants were likely to live longer. Those who were more self-disciplined, for instance, were no more likely to live to be very old. Also, being open to new ideas had no relationship to long life, which might explain all those bad-tempered old people who are fixed in their ways.Whether you can successfully change your personality as an adult is the subject of a longstanding psychological debate. But the new paper suggests that if you want long life, you should strive to be as outgoing as possible.Unfortunately, another recent study shows that your mother"s personality may also help determine your longevity. That study looked at nearly 28,000 Norwegian mothers and found that those morns who were more anxious, depressed and angry were more likely to feed their kids unhealthy diets. Patterns of childhood eating can be hard to break when we"re adults, which may mean that kids of depressed morns end up dying younger.Personality isn"tdestiny(命运), and everyone knows that individuals can learn to change. But both studies show that long life isn"t just a matter of your physical health but of your mental health. The aim of the study in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society is ______.
A. to see whether people"s personality affects their life span
B. to find out if one"s lifestyle has any effect on their health
C. to investigate the role of exercise in living a long life
D. to examine all the factors contributing to longevity
Finding the Right Home—and Contentment, TooA. When your elderly relative needs to enter some sort of long-term care facility—a moment few parents or children approach without fear—what you would like is to have everything made clear.B. Does assisted living really mark a great improvement over a nursing home, or has the industry simply hired better interior designers Are nursing homes as bad as people fear, or is that an out-modedstereotype(固定看法) Can doing one"s homework really steer families to the best places It is genuinely hard to know.C. I am about to make things more complicated by suggesting that what kind of facility an older person lives in may matter less than we have assumed. And that the characteristics adult children look for when they begin the search are not necessarily the things that make a difference to the people who are going to move in. I am not talking about the quality of care, let me hastily add. Nobody flourishes in a gloomy environment with irresponsible staff and a poor safety record. But an accumulating body of research indicates that some distinctions between one type of elder care and another have little real bearing on how well residents do.D. The most recent of these studies, published inThe Journal of Applied Gerontology, surveyed 150 Connecticut residents of assisted living, nursing homes and smaller residential care homes (known in some states as board and care homes or adult care homes). Researchers from the University of Connecticut Health Center asked the residents a large number of questions about their quality of life, emotional well-being and social interaction, as well as about the quality of the facilities.E. "We thought we would see differences based on the housing types," said the lead author of the study, Julie Robison, an associate professor of medicine at the university. A reasonable assumption—don"t families struggle to avoid nursing homes and suffer real guilt if they can"tF. In the initial results, assisted living residents did paint the most positive picture. They were less likely to report symptoms of depression than those in the other facilities, for instance, and less likely to be bored or lonely. They scored higher on social interaction.G. But when the researchers plugged in a number of other variables, such differences disappeared. It is not the housing type, they found, that creates differences in residents" responses. "It is the characteristics of the specific environment they are in, combined with their own personal characteristics—how healthy they feel they are, their age and marital status," Dr. Robison explained. Whether residents felt involved in the decision to move and how long they had lived there also proved significant.H. An elderly person who describes herself as in poor health, therefore, might be no less depressed in assisted living (even if her children preferred it) than in a nursing home. A person who had input into where he would move and has had time to adapt to it might do as well in a nursing home as in a small residential care home, other factors being equal. It is an interaction between the person and the place, not the sort of place in itself, that leads to better or worse experiences. "You can"t just say, Let"s put this person in a residential care home instead of a nursing home—she will be much better off," Dr. Robison said. What matters, she added, "is a combination of what people bring in with them, and what they find there."I. Such findings, which run counter to common sense, have surfaced before. In a multi-state study of assisted living, for instance, University of North Carolina researchers found that a host of variables—the facility"s type, size or age; whether a chain owned it; how attractive the neighborhood was—had no significant relationship to how the residents fared in terms of illness, mental decline, hospitalizations or mortality. What mattered most was the residents" physical health and mental status. What people were like when they came in had greater consequence than what happened once they were there.J. As I was considering all this, a press release from a respected research firm crossed my desk, announcing that the five-star rating system that Medicare developed in 2008 to help families compare nursing home quality also has little relationship to how satisfied its residents or their family members are. As a matter of fact, consumers expressed higher satisfaction with the one-star facilities, the lowest rated, than with the five-star ones. (More on this study and the star ratings will appear in a subsequent post.)K. Before we collectively tear our hair out—how are we supposed to find our way in a landscape this confusing—here is a thought from Dr. Philip Sloane, ageriatrician(老年病学专家) at the University of North Carolina: "In a way, that could be liberating for families."L. Of course, sons and daughters want to visit the facilities, talk to the administrators and residents and other families, and do everything possible to fulfill their duties. But perhaps they don"t have to mm themselves into private investigators or Congressional subcommittees. "Families can look a bit more for where the residents are going to be happy," Dr. Sloane said. And involving the future resident in the process can be very important.M. We all have our own ideas about what would bring our parents happiness. They have their ideas, too. A friend recently took her mother to visit an expensive assisted living/nursing home near my town. I have seen this place—it is elegant, inside and out. But nobody greeted the daughter and mother when they arrived, though the visit had been planned; nobody introduced them to the other residents. When they had lunch in the dining room, they sat alone at a table.N. The daughter feared her mother would be ignored there, and so she decided to move her into a more welcoming facility. Based on what is emerging from some of this research, that might have been as rational a way as any to reach a decision. Many people feel guilty when they cannot find a place other than a nursing home for their parents.
Why do some people live to be older than others You know the standard explanations: keeping a moderate diet, engaging in regular exercise, etc. But what effect does your personality have on yourlongevity(长寿) Do some kinds of personalities lead to longer lives A new study in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society looked at this question by examining the personality characteristics of 246 children of people who had lived to be at least 100.The study shows that those living the longest are more outgoing, more active and lessneurotic(神经质的) than other people. Long-living women are also more likely to be sympathetic and cooperative than women with a normal life span. These findings are in agreement with what you would expect from the evolutionary theory: those who like to make friends and help others can gather enough resources to make it through tough times.Interestingly, however, other characteristics that you might consider advantageous had no impact on whether study participants were likely to live longer. Those who were more self-disciplined, for instance, were no more likely to live to be very old. Also, being open to new ideas had no relationship to long life, which might explain all those bad-tempered old people who are fixed in their ways.Whether you can successfully change your personality as an adult is the subject of a longstanding psychological debate. But the new paper suggests that if you want long life, you should strive to be as outgoing as possible.Unfortunately, another recent study shows that your mother"s personality may also help determine your longevity. That study looked at nearly 28,000 Norwegian mothers and found that those morns who were more anxious, depressed and angry were more likely to feed their kids unhealthy diets. Patterns of childhood eating can be hard to break when we"re adults, which may mean that kids of depressed morns end up dying younger.Personality isn"tdestiny(命运), and everyone knows that individuals can learn to change. But both studies show that long life isn"t just a matter of your physical health but of your mental health. What does the recent study of Norwegian mothers show
A. Children"s personality characteristics are invariably determined by their mothers.
B. People with unhealthy eating habits are likely to die sooner.
C. Mothers" influence on children may last longer than fathers".
D. Mothers" negative personality characteristics may affect their children"s life spans.