In this chapter, it’s kind of relieving to know happiness is not a necessary predictor of longevity. Two reasons were mentioned. First, people who joke around may intend to cover up trauma or abuse that they experienced beforehand. Secondly, carefree people who always follow their hearts are oblivious to dangers around them, are more likely to die from suicide and accident, etc. For myself, I like to joke around when I’m with a huge group of “hello friends” to avoid the embarrassing silent. I’m pretty conscious that under those circumstances, I’m not truly happy even though I laugh a lot. Therefore, I intentionally tried to decrease the number of times that I have to fake happiness. It’s reassuring to know that the fake happiness is not a component leading to health life. As mentioned above, I’m definitely not a carefree person. As a student majoring in psychology, I’m very conscious about the health of my psychological status and try to take care of my emotions.
Surprisingly, there are also risks to be optimistic. The Thinker Bell principle only works well when people are facing an adversity, such as a medical regimen, because optimistic people are more willing to persist in the efforts and stick with their goals. However, under other circumstances, optimistic people also tend to have unrealistic goals and they would be very disappointed when things turned out badly. It’s really hard for me to categorize myself as an optimistic or a pessimistic. I think it’s really depends on situation. Therefore, I was very frustrated when taking the self-assessment tests in the book, since I could not choose an answer because my choice could vary a lot based on different situations. Therefore, I’m really interested in the validity of these self-measurements of personality.
]An amazing point at the end of the chapter 4 is that people are very likely go astray in the “reason and result” relationship between two factors. In healthcare field the example is that people argue happiness led to longevity; however, recommendations for a happier life are actually ones for a healthier life that were reformed. Therefore, in fact, people are happy because they are healthy; the happiness is the by-product of their health life patterns, not the reverse. I think really thinking about the “reason and result” relationship is an effective way to critically evaluate some commonly hold beliefs and to stay wise.
Finally, it’s very confusing that Terman women who were worriers in young adulthood are more likely to die younger bur it’s a different story for Terman males. I was surprised with this gender gap and really wanted to know more about how the researchers got the conclusions and how they are going to explain them later in the book.