The Vital of Optimism

Literature and folklore abound with tales of people who cling to life as long as they have "reason for living," and mysteriously die within weeks after they feel that their purpose is accomplished. Now a young sociologist at Johns Hopkins University has suggested that this fictional behavior pattern is well founded in fact. More often than not, accourding to a study by David Phillips, people who are about to die seem to hang on until after a birthday, an election, a religious holiday or another event that they keenly anticipate.

Phillips, 26, who presented his findings to this week's convention of the American Sociological Association in San Francisco, initially checked the death dates of 1,251 famous Americans listed in Who Was Who and Four Hundred Notable Americans. He found that death came for them least often during the months before their birthdays and most frequently during the three months afterward. Turning to cities that have kept precise death records, he discovered that between 1875 and 1915 the death rate in Budapest, which had a large population of Jews, declined markedly during the month before Yom Kippur, the high holy day of atonement; the pre-Yom Kippur "death dip" also occurred during the years 1921-1965 in New York City, which also has a big Jewish population. In the dramatically expectant weeks before every U.S. election between 1904 and 1964, the nationwide death rate showed a marked decline.

Familiar Pressures. Phillips suspects that the quality of expectation is all-important. He suggests, for example, that a decrease in the death rate might not occur during the period of anticipation before Christmas--perhaps because of the familiar pressures that also accompany that season. Or it might not apply to ordinary people whose birthdays are not celebrated with the fuss that surrounds a man of fame. Still, the statistics that Phillips has gathered are convincing enough to impress the Russell Sage Foundation, which is oriented toward the social sciences; it has just given him an eleven-month grant for additional explorations of the vital buoyancy of optimism. Eventually he hopes to establish that anticipating significant events can help people to live longer, a finding that could lead to important changes in the psychological treatment of the elderly and the seriously ill. If further study bears out this hypothesis, Phillips says, it will prove that "dying can be a form of social behavior."

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