Subjective life expectancy, death anxiety, and health behavior were assessed in 36 college students with at least one parent who died prematurely (age 55 or younger) due to illness (PD group) and in thirty-six matched participants with both parents alive (PA group). Participants who lost a parent prematurely estimated that their own life spans would be shorter than those of other people in their age-cohort. They also predicted a shorter life span for themselves than did the matched participants. In both groups, participants' Cognitive and Affective Subjective Life Expectancy differed significantly from each other. In the PA group, individuals' projection of their life span when based on “personal feelings” was significantly higher than when they based their estimate on “everything that is objectively true” about them. In the PD group, the opposite relationship was observed between these two variables, and the difference was magnified for the subgroup of PD participants who indicated that they believed they would die of the same cause as their parents. This subgroup also reported significantly poorer smoking and dietary behavior than either PD participants who did not feel that their parents death would be related to their own, or PA participants.
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