HOSTILITY AND HEALTH
A series of long-term epidemiological studies support the theory that hostility can be lethal. In two studies begun in the 1960s, 155 medical students and 118 law students were given standard personality tests at the age of twenty-five in which their hostility was gauged by their described reactions to about fifty everyday situations. Following up the study twenty-five years later, researchers found that among the lawyers who were rated as basically easygoing and had scored in the lowest quarter on the hostility scale, only four percent had died by the age of fifty. But among those ranking in the top quarter of the hostility chart, twenty percent had died. Among the doctors, only two percent of the low-hostility types were dead by age fifty, compared to fourteen percent of their more volatile counterparts. From Chicago Tribune, December 20, 1990
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