The higher participants rated their feelings of happiness over the course of a day, the longer they lived, according a five-year study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Previous studies aimed at determining links between life span and self-perceived emotional states have relied on people’s ability to recall the past.
Instead of relying on memory, fallible among many people, researchers asked more than 3,800 people aged 52-79 years – participants in a long-running British study on aging – to rate their feelings of happiness or anxiety four times over the course of a day.
The authors then followed the participants for five years, recording the number of deaths during this period.
They found that people who reported feeling happiest had a 35 percent reduced risk of dying compared with those who reported feeling least happy. In contrast, emotions like anxiety appeared to have little bearing on survival.
As the study was designed to determine correlations, not cause-and-effect relationships, the authors caution that the findings should not be interpreted to mean that feeling happier extends life span. However, the findings do underscore the importance of emotional well-being among elderly people.
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