From: Positively Positive
By: Hirshel Jaffe
As our series, Your Soulful Sunday continues, enjoy this article from Positively Positive.
Your Soulful Sunday series helps you fill your life back up with purpose and alignment.
What is the one characteristic that a lot of 90+ year olds have? That is right, a positive attitude of gratitude.
In this Your Soulful Sunday, we bring you a wonderful article by Hirshel Jaffe.
In the early 1990s one of the great medical research exercises of modern times took place. It became known as the Nun Study. Some 700 American nuns agreed to allow their records to be accessed by a research team investigating the process of aging and Alzheimer’s Disease. At the start of the study the participants were aged between 75 and 102.
What gave this study its unusual scope is that in 1930 the nuns, then in their twenties, had been asked by the Mother Superior to write a brief autobiographical account of their life and their reasons for entering the convent. These documents were now analyzed by the researchers using a specially devised coding system to register positive and negative emotions.
By annually assessing the nuns’ current state of health, the researchers were able to test whether their emotional state in 1930 had an effect on their health sixty years later. Because they had all lived a very similar lifestyle during these six decades, they formed an ideal group for testing hypotheses about the relationship between emotional attitudes and health.
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