A major strength of the present study lies in the large sample of participants from the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA, 40) who were followed for almost five decades. With notable exceptions (e.g., 29, 31), previous studies were largely based on samples in poor health, followed for short intervals, with personality data obtained a few years before death (e.g., 25, 32, 36). By contrast, the BLSA participants are generally healthy and personality data were collected during adulthood, decades before death, so disease related processes or terminal declines were unlikely to affect the personality assessment. Further, although the sample is generally healthy, we examined whether the effects of the two major leading causes of preventable deaths (9), smoking and obesity, modify the associations of personality traits with risk of death. Finally, we examined whether personality predictors of longevity differ by sex, and whether the predictors for the sample as a whole differ from the predictors for the single most frequent cause of death, cardiovascular disease (41).
