放心吧，爱生气不影响寿命

Happiness Doesn’t Bring Good Health, Study Finds
放心吧，爱生气不影响寿命

Go ahead and sulk. Unhappiness won’t kill you.

放心生气吧。不高兴不会要人命。

A study published on Wednesday in The Lancet, following one million middle-aged women in Britain for 10 years, finds that the widely held view that happiness enhances health and longevity is unfounded.

《柳叶刀》(The Lancet)周三刊登的一篇研究论文发现，高兴有利于健康和延年益寿这个广泛流传的观点是没有依据的。该研究对英国的100万名中年女性进行了长达10年的跟踪调查。

“Happiness and related measures of well-being do not appear to have any direct effect on mortality,” the researchers concluded.

“高兴及与之相关的健康指标对寿命似乎没有任何直接影响，”研究人员给出这样的结论。

“Good news for the grumpy” is one way to interpret the findings, said Sir Richard Peto, an author of the study and a professor of medical statistics and epidemiology at the University of Oxford. He and his fellow researchers decided to look into the subject because, he said, there is a widespread belief that stress and unhappiness cause disease.

论文作者之一、牛津大学医学统计与流行病学教授理查德・皮托爵士(Sir Richard Peto)表示，“对脾气坏的人来说是好消息”是对研究结果的一种解读方式。他说，自己和其他研究人员之所以决定研究这个问题，是因为人们普遍相信，紧张和不高兴会导致疾病。

Such beliefs can fuel a tendency to blame the sick for bringing ailments on themselves by being negative, and to warn the well to cheer up or else.

这类观点可能会加剧一种倾向，即责怪病人自己情绪消极导致惹病上身，以及告诫身体健康的人要振作起来等。

“Believing things that aren’t true isn’t a good idea,” Professor Peto said in an interview. “There are enough scare stories about health.”

“相信不真实的事情并不可取，”皮托教授在接受采访时说。“已经有好多和健康有关的惊悚故事了。”

The new study says earlier research confused cause and effect, suggesting that unhappiness made people ill when it is actually the other way around.

这项新研究表示，早前的研究混淆了原因和结果，称不高兴导致了生病，但实际上却恰恰相反。

The results come from the so-called Million Women Study, which recruited women aged 50 to 69 from 1996 to 2001, and tracked them with questionnaires and official records of deaths and hospital admissions. The questionnaires asked how often the women felt happy, in control, relaxed and stressed, and also instructed them to rate their health and list ailments like high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma, arthritis and depression or anxiety.

上述结果来自一个名为“百万女性研究”(Million Women Study)的项目。1996到2001年间，该研究项目招募了大批年龄在50到69岁之间的女性，并用调查问卷以及正式的死亡和入院记录对她们进行跟踪调查。问卷会询问她们感到高兴、一切尽在掌握之中、放松和紧张的频率，同时指导她们评定自己的健康状况，并列出高血压、糖尿病、哮喘、关节炎、抑郁或焦虑等疾病。

The researchers included questions about happiness “because it’s something a lot of people were interested in,” Professor Peto said.

皮托教授称，研究人员之所以列入和高兴有关的问题“是因为很多人对此感兴趣”。

When the answers were analyzed statistically, unhappiness and stress were not associated with an increased risk of death. It is not clear whether the findings apply to men.

在对答案进行统计分析时，研究人员发现，不高兴和紧张与死亡风险的增加并不相关。尚不清楚相关研究结果是否适用于男性。

Professor Peto said particularly important data came from 500,000 women who reported on their baseline surveys that they were in good health, with no history of heart disease, cancer, stroke or emphysema. A “substantial minority” of these healthy women said they were stressed or unhappy, he said, but over the next decade they were no more likely to die than were the women who were generally happy.

皮托教授表示，特别重要的数据来自其中50万名女性。她们在初步调查中自称身体健康，没有心脏病、癌症、脑卒中或肺气肿史。他说，这些健康女性中“可观的少部分人”称自己感到紧张或不高兴，但在接下来的10年里，她们死亡的可能性并不比那些基本高兴的女性大。

“This finding refutes the large effects of unhappiness and stress on mortality that others have claimed,” Dr. Peto said.

“这个发现驳斥了其他一些人宣称的不高兴和紧张对寿命有很大影响的说法，”皮托说。

Unhappiness itself may not affect health directly, but it can do harm in other ways, by driving people to suicide, alcoholism or other dangerous behaviors, he warned.

不过，他也警告，不高兴本身或许不会直接影响健康，但它可能会通过其他方式产生危害，如逼得人自杀、酗酒或做出其他危险行为。

This type of study, which depends on participants’ self-assessments, is not considered as reliable as a rigorously designed experiment in which subjects are picked at random and assigned to a treatment or control group. But the huge number of people in this study gives it power.

这类研究有赖于参与者自我评估，被认为不及严格设计的实验可靠。在经过严格设计的实验中，研究人员随机挑选实验对象并将其分配到实验组和控制组中。但参与此次调查的人数巨大，让这项研究有了份量。

Still, some observers noted that measuring emotions is more nuanced and complex than simply declaring happiness or unhappiness.

然而，一些观察人士指出，衡量情绪比简单地说自己高兴或不高兴要更微妙、更复杂。

“I would have liked to see more discussion of how people translate these complicated feelings into a self-report of happiness,” said Baruch Fischhoff, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University who studies decision-making, who was not involved in the study. “Think about everything that’s going on in your life and tell me how happy you are. Happiness is a squishy measure.”

“我会想看到更多的讨论，有关人们如何把这些复杂的感受转化成自我评定的高兴度，”卡内基梅隆大学(Carnegie Mellon University)研究决策过程的心理学者巴鲁奇・费施霍夫(Baruch Fischhoff)说。“想想生活里发生的一切，然后说出自己有多高兴。但高兴是一个弹性评价。”费施霍夫没有参与此项研究。

The results of earlier studies have been mixed, with some finding that unhappiness causes illness and others showing no link, Dr. Fischhoff said.

早前的研究结果变化不定。费施霍夫表示，一些研究发现不高兴会导致疾病，而其他一些研究则表明两者之间没有联系。

“It looks to me like people have collected a lot of data without finding a clear signal,” he said. “So if there is some correlation out there, it’s not very big.”

“在我看来是，大家搜集了大量数据，但却没发现一个清晰的信号，”他说。“所以就算存在某种相关性，也不是很大。”

An editorial accompanying the study in The Lancet noted that it had “the largest population so far in happiness studies,” and praised its statistical methods. But it also said more research was needed.

在《柳叶刀》上，随论文刊登的编者按指出，这是“迄今为止参与者人数最多的和高兴有关的研究”，并对其统计方法表示了称赞，但也表示还需要进行更多研究。

Professor Peto said he doubted that the new study would change many minds because beliefs about the perils of unhappiness are so ingrained. “People are still going to believe that stress causes heart attacks,” he said.

皮托教授称，他怀疑这项新研究并不会让很多人改变看法，因为认为不高兴有害健康的观点根深蒂固。“人们还是会认为紧张会导致心梗，”他说。