Blue Zone “super-agers” around the globe have become famous for having remarkable life expectancies, on average. Not only that, they live healthier for longer. Could their personalities be influencing health markers in these long-living residents?
Researchers from Italy’s Cagliari University are the latest to investigate why people living in Sardinia’s Blue Zone might have an edge over the general population when it comes to living healthier for longer.
This area is designated a blue zone because of its high percentage of residents aged 90 and older, a statistic that has remained consistent over the past 150 years.
Not only that, on average they enjoy a much healthier life in older age.
Sardinia isn’t a unique blue zone, however. There are others in Okinawa (Japan), Ikaria (Greece) and Nicoya (Costa Rica).
In this latest study, published in the International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology, researchers compared Sardinia’s “super-agers” with other older adults in a nearby rural region.
“This study pursued two main objectives: (1) to examine the associations among Big Five personality traits, health-related quality of life (HRQoL), and psychological well-being in late adulthood; and (2) to compare these variables between community-dwelling older adults living in the Sardinian Blue Zone and those residing in a neighbouring non-Blue Zone rural area,” the researchers explain.
The Big Five traits are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. While personalities are, of course, more nuanced, this measure has been used to identify associations between health markers and innate human nature.
The team looked at 125 older adults from these two areas, aged 71 to 101, with a mean age of 80.1 years. Both groups completed a collection of surveys, and then the data were adjusted to account for age and education.
Higher levels of openness to experience, conscientiousness, and agreeableness were tied to better psychological well-being and engaging in more leisure activities in older age.
Meanwhile, neuroticism was negatively linked to quality of life in these later years.
“Individuals in the Blue Zone showed higher levels of openness to experience, more effective coping strategies, greater emotional competence, and more frequent involvement in cognitively and physically stimulating activities compared to their non-Blue Zone peers,” the researchers note.
“Overall, these findings suggest that the combination of adaptive personality traits and coping resources promotes a more active lifestyle, providing insights into the mechanisms of successful aging.”
The researchers, however, did not find that their data supported their hypotheses entirely.
“Contrary to our hypotheses, no significant associations emerged between HRQoL and the Big Five traits, except for neuroticism,” they write.
“This lack of association deserves attention; it suggests that in late adulthood, perceived physical and functional health (HRQoL) may be more strongly influenced by objective physical conditions or socio-environmental support rather than by stable personality dispositions, whereas it was documented that participants who reported higher levels of neuroticism also believed that their HRQoL was lower.”
Essentially, the super-agers may be in a bit of a chicken-or-egg situation; they appear to enjoy a higher health-related quality of life, but is their outlook influencing their biomarkers or the other way around?
Still, one’s perception of health may be tied to some aspects of physical health – particularly when it comes to conditions like chronic stress.
“HRQoL was positively associated with coping strategies, indicating that the perceived ability to manage stress may be more critical for subjective health perception than personality traits themselves,” the researchers add.
The team also found that residents in the Sardinian Blue Zone had higher levels of curiosity and receptiveness to new ideas in general, and were more adept at understanding and sharing their emotions.
While the researchers describe the lifestyles of Blue Zoners as simple but highly active, in general, a lot of their pursuits were cognitively based. They spent an average of 11.3 hours per week on cognitively and physically stimulating leisure activities, compared with 6.8 hours for those in the other group.
There are limitations to this study, as we touched on earlier, but it’s nonetheless a good reason to spend your golden years having fun and staying positive – in whatever shape that takes.
“Future research should include larger, multi-site cohorts and adopt a comparative approach across different Blue Zones,” the scientists conclude. “The reliance on self-report measures suggests that future research should incorporate objective measures of physical performance and clinical assessments of pain and mood disorders.”
The study was published in the International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology.
Fact-checked by Mike McRae
