Living longer: conscientious kids....

Dependable, truthful children who ponder the consequences of their behavior before acting do more than delight their mothers. A research team contends that these conscientious kids also tend to survive a few years longer as adults than their more impulsive, unreliable age-mates.

Growing up with parents who did not get divorced and having a stable marriage of one's own also help keep death at bay, according to a follow-up of people first studied when they attended California public schools more than 70 years ago.

At that time, Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman recruited 856 boys and 672 girls who performed particularly well in school and had an IQ score of at least 135. Every 5 to 10 years afterward, experimenters administered a variety of questionnaires to the volunteers (who dubbed themselves Termites). In 1991, half of the men and one-third of the women were known to have died.

Conscientious children -- especially boys -- lived from 2 to 4 years longer than "nonconscientious" peers, report Howard S. Friedman, a psychologist at the University of California, Riverside, and his colleagues. A similar survival edge emerged for those with no personal or family history of divorce. So, for example, conscientious men from stable families lived an average of 81 years, compared to 74 years for nonconscientious men whose parents had divorced.

The influence of these factors on death rates is less than the known effects of sex (men die at younger ages than women), cigarette smoking, and alcohol abuse. Yet conscientiousness and marital history affect mortality about as much as better-known risk factors such as systolic blood pressure, cholesterol concentrations, exercise, and diet, Friedman and his coworkers assert in the February American Psychologist.

Surprisingly, people who were optimistic and cheerful as children tended to die several years younger than their less buoyant counterparts. Although the optimists more often smoked cigarettes, drank alcohol, and took other risks, these factors do not account fully for their accelerated death rate.

Emotional instability, depression, and hostility in childhood had no clear effect on adult mortality rates, the scientists add.

Although the Termites do not constitute a random population sample, Friedman's group argues that the roles of conscientiousness and marital stability in mortality deserve a closer look.