Benefits of volunteering stem from personality: study

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Benefits of volunteering stem from personality: study

By Allison Bond NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Volunteerism has been linked to better mental and physical health, but those effects may come from the personality traits that lead one to volunteer in the first place, not the work itself, U.S. researchers say. The results call into question the practice of encouraging people to do volunteer work for their own good, but also suggest approaches to encouraging those without a typical volunteer personality to find ways of contributing. The bottom line, said senior study author Thomas Oltmanns, a psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis, is that "when people are considering volunteering, there are obvious benefits associated, including to society â€" people volunteer for many other reasons than just helping themselves.” It’s well known that people with certain traits are more likely to volunteer. In the past, researchers who linked apparent health benefits to volunteer work did not factor in the personality traits that go along with the urge to volunteer, Oltmanns’ team points out in the Journals of Gerontology: Series B. To tease apart the health effects of those personality traits and the volunteering itself, the researchers used data from the St. Louis Personality and Aging Network, a study of 1,630 adults between the ages of 55 and 64 in the St. Louis community.

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