In this study of personality traits, the offspring of centenarians appear to have distinctive characteristics that may have important implications for their longevity. The data presented here suggest that the offspring of centenarians demonstrate greater extraversion and lower neuroticism and that the female subjects also reveal greater agreeableness. The high levels of extraversion are all the more impressive given that the extraversion scores were higher than in the full adult sample, which had a lower mean age (~ 50 vs 73). Lower extraversion, not higher, would normally be expected with older age.14 Generally speaking, women usually score higher than men in neuroticism, particularly in Western and European cultures,15 yet among the offspring of centenarians, the male and female mean T-scores for neuroticism were similar.
