Wanna live longer? It may be too late.

The Herald has a headline “Wanna live longer? Look on the bright side”.  The story goes on to say

A study of 243 centenarians revealed that most were cheerful and sociable. The positive personality traits may be genetically based, the researchers believe.

If it’s really genetics that produces the positive personality traits, the advice isn’t going to do much good.  The research paper that produced the story is here, for comparison

The story also says

The study involved Ashkenazi Jews from eastern Europe.

Actually, from the US, though many of them were migrants from central and eastern Europe.  Then

They are good candidates for gene studies because they’re genetically similar to one another.

which is true.  But this wasn’t a gene study, and the relative genetic and environmental homogeneity of the Ashkenazim make them a particularly bad choice for a study that compares Ashkenazi centenarians with the US population of all ages.

In fact, the point of the research paper wasn’t to compare centenarians with others.  The main point of the research paper was really to describe the questionnaire that the researchers are using in their genetic study and compare it to other questionnaires measuring similar psychological traits.  We can see this from the concluding sentence in their abstract:

Findings suggest that the POPS is a psychometrically sound measure of personality in centenarians and capture personality aspects of extraversion, neuroticism, and conscientiousness, as well as dispositional optimism which may contribute to successful aging.  

That is, the researchers assume that these personality aspects will turn out to be important (in the genetic studies) and are looking at how well they are measuring these traits.  That’s all perfectly reasonable, it’s just strange to see how it morphs into the newspaper story.