Scientists have discovered 5 personality traits linked with a long life

Decades of research have linked specific personality traits to a longer life expectancy. Some of them — from friendliness to emotional stability — may be written into our genes.

And while one study found that we're not particularly good at identifying these traits in ourselves, it suggested that our close friends are often spot-on.

Read on (preferably with a friend) to find out if you possess any or all of these characteristics:

Conscientiousness

For their 75-year study of 300 engaged couples who enrolled in the study in their mid-20s, researchers found that men who were seen by their friends as more conscientious, meaning they were less likely to take risks but also tended to be more thorough and efficient, lived longer.

Participants in the study picked a handful of friends to rate their personality using a 36-question scale created by psychologist E. Lowell Kelly in 1940. (To verify its tenacity, the researchers recently compared it with several other personality tests of the past decade.)

Questions in the scale ranged from general queries like "Is he physically energetic and peppy?" to more personal ones like "How does he meet his appointments?"

Of the men in the study, those who were seen as more conscientious lived longer. A 2007 study of Californian men and women between 1930 and 2000 came to similar conclusions: People (regardless of their gender) who were independently ranked as conscientious as children and as adults lived longer than their peers who were not conscientious during either phase of their lives.

Openness

For that same 75-year study, openness also emerged as a trait that was linked with a long life, second to conscientiousness. So men who ranked highly in terms of this quality, meaning they were willing to lend an ear to new and different ideas, feelings, and concepts, tended to live longer than other men in the study.

Emotional stability

The 75-year longevity study had slightly different takeaways for women than it did for men, a finding which might hint at how different genders were seen as having different characteristics of value in the 1930s (and today).

Of the women participants, for example, emotionally stability was the trait with the strongest links to a long life.