Optimists live longer than pessimists

Is this glass half full or half empty?

If you said half full, congratulations. A new study suggests you'll live healthier and longer than your pessimistic peers. And if you're trusting of other people as well as an optimist, well, you'd better plan on having a lot of money stashed away in your retirement account.

I don't know about you, but I'm highly skeptical of the scientists who conducted this study. Besides, what's so great about outliving all of your friends? Sheesh.

But seriously, folks, the new study analyzed data from nearly 100,000 postmenopausal participants (say that three times fast) in the Women's Health Initiative, or WHI. The WHI is best known for its clinical trials of postmenopausal hormone therapy, whose findings caused women to abandon the drugs in droves.

In the new analysis, being presented this week at the

American Psychosomatic Society's annual meeting in Chicago, the researchers found that optimists--women who expected that good things, not bad, would happen--were 30% less likely to die of heart disease during the course of the study than pessimists. And trusting women were 23% less likely to die of cancer than their "cynically hostile"--or highly mistrustful--counterparts.

So would a magic happy pill make us all live longer? In a press release, Hilary Tindle, a University of Pittsburgh internist who led the study, cautions that it doesn't prove pessimism kills. Tindle says more research is needed to determine whether treatments to increase optimism or decrease cynical hostility would lead to better health.