Accomplished worriers – the ones who went to the Woody Allen school of catastrophizing – have something new to fret about: Research suggests that it is possible to worry oneself into an early grave. In a study to be published in Psychological Science, investigators at Purdue University tracked 1,663 men middle-aged and older over a 12-year period. Regularly testing the subjects’ neuroticism on a standard personality inventory, they found that men who scored above the 50th percentile in neuroticism, and whose neuroticism grew worse by 20 percentage points over the years, were 40 percent more likely to die during the study period than men whose neuroticism remained stable. Although there’s plenty of evidence that certain behavioral traits are associated with increased risk of death, this is one of the first studies to suggest a change in such a trait over time could also affect mortality – for good or for bad.|Los Angeles Times
