Positive Psychology News Daily � Yes, I Stand by My Words, “Happiness Equals Love—Full Stop”

Positive Psychology News Daily � Yes, I Stand by My Words, “Happiness Equals Love—Full Stop”: George Vaillant, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School

In a study lasting 70 years George Vaillant and colleagues have found:

"Adolescent social class, intelligence, treadmill endurance, and constitution meant little to successful aging in 1940 Harvard graduates. In contrast, capacity for empathic relationships predicted a great deal"

He defined a rewarding old age as:

• Having achieved high earned income and high occupational prestige
• Still being alive by age 80 and being in good physical and mental health (both subjectively and objectively)
• Having good relationships - a happy marriage (ages 40-70), close relationships with children, and social support at age 70.
• Stopping smoking early in life. 'smoking, that great destroyer of health, was a marker for alcoholism and major depression—those two great destroyers of relationships'

And found that these could be predicted by markers of 'capacity for empathic relationships' in early adulthood.

To me his reasoning is a little circular, but I do think that focussing on building our capacity to have successful, empathic relationships has got to be a good idea.