From a Religious Orders Study.
The priests and nuns are an especially good group to study, he says, because they live in almost identical socioeconomic and social worlds.
He and his colleagues noted when some of the subjects died — 164 of them did — and looked at tests measuring their level of negative feelings and their ability to express it. Their findings appear in the current issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology.
Over an average period of five years, the 10 percent of the subjects with the greatest tendency to keep negative emotions bottled up — those who “sit and stew” — were twice as likely to die as the 10 percent on the other end of the scale.
The winners in the life-span sweepstakes were those who said, “‘I get angry and I slam a door, I curse a lot,'” Wilson says.
Cursing? Priests and nuns? Yes, indeed. “The Catholic clergymen and nuns feel the full range of emotion that everybody else feels,” he says.
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Well I don’t keep things bottled up or curse, after all I have a blog. Sometimes I will read a story and will grow angry after reading it. I will then set to posting about it. The process of trying to say something intelligent about the story usually causes me to calm down and in some cases not to post anything at all.
1 comment
My favorite religious orders study is the one (no kidding, now) that showed cloistered female religious live longer than any other female group, while male cloistered die the youngest. There were, of course, all sorts of variables in the middle, but the study concluded that men need women to live longer, healthier lives while men tend to suck the life right out of women.
What I wanna know is, did we really need a study to prove that?