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Linguistic Evidence for the Failure Mindset as a Predictor of Life Span Longevity

  • Original Article
  • Published:
Annals of Behavioral Medicine

Abstract

Background

When people think that their efforts will fail to achieve positive outcomes, they sometimes give up their efforts after control, which can have negative health consequences.

Purpose

Problematic orientations of this type, such as pessimism, helplessness, or fatalism, seem likely to be associated with a cognitive mindset marked by higher levels of accessibility for failure words or concepts. Thus, the purpose of the present research was to determine whether there are individual differences in the frequency with which people think about failure, which in turn are likely to impact health across large spans of time.

Methods

Following self-regulatory theories of health and the learned helplessness tradition, two archival studies (total n = 197) scored texts (books or speeches) for their use of failure words, a category within the Harvard IV dictionary of the General Inquirer.

Results

People who used failure words more frequently exhibited shorter subsequent life spans, and this relationship remained significant when controlling for birth year. Furthermore, study 2 implicated behavioral factors. For example, the failure/longevity relationship was numerically stronger among people whose causes of death appeared to be preventable rather than non-preventable.

Conclusions

These results significantly extend our knowledge of the personality/longevity relationship while highlighting the value of individual differences in word usage as predictors of health and mortality.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Psychology Department, North Dakota State University, 2765, PO Box 6050, Fargo, ND, 58108-6050, USA

    Ian B. Penzel BA, Michelle R. Persich BS & Michael D. Robinson PhD

  2. Psychology Department, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Ryan L. Boyd MS

Authors
  1. Ian B. Penzel BA
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  2. Michelle R. Persich BS
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  3. Ryan L. Boyd MS
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  4. Michael D. Robinson PhD
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Correspondence to Ian B. Penzel BA.

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Authors’ Statement of Conflict of Interest and Adherence to Ethical Standards

Ian B. Penzel, Michelle R. Persich, Ryan L. Boyd, and Michael D. Robinson declare that they have no conflict of interest. All procedures, including the informed consent process, were conducted in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000.

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Penzel, I.B., Persich, M.R., Boyd, R.L. et al. Linguistic Evidence for the Failure Mindset as a Predictor of Life Span Longevity. ann. behav. med. 51, 348–355 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12160-016-9857-x

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