What will you call your baby?

It has been said "A child's name is generally a settled affair when his first breath is drawn and his future personality must then grow within its shadow". How you name your child can shape his/her life experience. For example research has shown that teachers give higher marks to students with more likeable names. It has also been demonstrated that people whose names are earlier in the alphabet (A, B, C) are more likely to be successful than those whose names start with letters that appear late in the alphabet. Maybe its something to do with always being last on the list?

In the 1960's, researchers Hartman et al investigated whether people with 'strange' names were more likely to be psychologically disturbed than those with more 'normal' names. They examined over 10,000 psychiatric court records and from those they found 88 people with very unusual first names such as Oder, Lethal and Vere. They selected a control group of 88 individuals who were matched on gender, age and location of birth, and who had more usual names. Those with unusual names were significantly more likely than the control group to be diagnosed as psychotic.

It appears that your initials can even affect how long you live! Christenfield et al (1999) used an electronic dictionary to generate every possible 3 letter word, then separated those that were clearly positive (e.g. ACE, HUG, JOY) from the more negative words like PIG, BUM and DIE. They searched a database of California death certificates and examined the age at which people with positive initials and negative initials died. Controlling for several factors, the researchers found that men with positive initials lived around 4 and a half years longer than average, whereas those with negative initials died around 3 years earlier than average. Women with positive initials lived an additional 3 years (although in their case there was no detrimental effect from having negative initials).