Science Says Your High School Personality Is Linked To How Long You’ll Live

An epic new study which looked at nearly 50 years of data from over 26,000 former high school students has linked teen personality traits to mortality and the results are kinda great for sad sack emo/grunge lords of yore.

Published this week in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, the research looked to expand upon the established understanding that your personality traits in mid-adulthood can predict your probability of dying early, by going all the way back to what kind of teen you were. The 48 year monitoring period looked at data from US school kids in the 1960s through to their health status as middle to late aged baby boomers today to see if being a jock or a nerd in high school means you’re more likely to die first. Cheery stuff!

Jughead will live forever, apparently.

How exactly the study calculated the outcomes has something to do with a bunch of incomprehensible nerd shit like “univariate distributions of all variables” and “moderately intercorrelated, separate covariate-adjusted models” but who’s got time to learn what all those words mean? Not me, that’s for fucking sure!

All you really need to know though is it looked at ten personality traits in teens such as impulsiveness, leadership and sociability, mapped them to the so-called Big 5 taxonomy of personality (Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness and Consciousness) and then looked for patterns with eventual mortality statistics. The peer-reviewed (that’s good!) final report is pretty unambiguous about said patterns stating “adolescent personality appears to be a predictor of long-term mortality regardless of one’s social background”.

So what types of teens live longer? Those whose high school personalities scored higher for energy, empathy, calmness, tidiness and maturity were all associated with lower relative risk of death whereas those with higher levels of impulsivity, leadership, self-confidence and sociability tend to cark it earlier.

RIP Cordelia Chase very confident and very dead now.

Some of these results are kinda no-brainers as it makes sense that calm and mature teens generally go on to live longer lives than that naughty impulsive kid from school who took up parkour at uni and rides a motorcycle.

What’s interesting though is how leadership and self-confidence in teens, ostensibly good qualities to foster in young people, leads to shorter life-spans. Sucked in former School Captains and popular kids, you’re all gonna die soon(er)!

The best news out of it all is that if like many of our generation you went through an emo phase in your formative years, you very well might live forever. Emo and emo-adjacent character tropes such as calmness, social sensibility (being in touch with yours and others feelings), intellectual curiosity and an aversion to being sociable all rank higher for teen life expectancy. Who’d have thought listening to all that Evanescence would make you live longer?

You can read the full research report here if you like long words and fascinating graphs, otherwise, it’s not too late to get a boost of emo and try to eke out a few more years on this planet so go nuts: