Objective: Health complications as a result of diabetes place major financial strain on individuals, financially and emotionally. The onset and severity of these complications is largely driven by patients’ behaviors, making psychosocial factors that influence behaviors key targets for interventions. One promising factor is sense of purpose, or the degree to which a person believes their life has meaning. Methods: Coordinated analysis using 12 datasets cross-sectionally and eight longitudinally (total N = 63,307) estimated the degree to which sense of purpose is associated with smoking, subjective health, and cardiovascular disease among diabetic adults. In addition, effect sizes for diabetic adults was compared to samples of non-diabetic adults, estimating whether the relationship of purpose to health is tempered by the presence of diabetes. Coordinated analysis allows for greater generalizability of results across cultures, time periods, and measurement instruments. Results: Sense of purpose was associated with higher self-rated health and lower rates of smoking and cardiovascular disease both cross-sectionally and prospectively and did not differ between diabetic and non-diabetic samples. Conclusions: These results highlight the relationship of a key individual difference, sense of purpose, to the behaviors and outcomes of diabetic adults. While more research is needed to determine the boundaries of this relationship, it seems sense of purpose may be considered in the future as a potential target for intervention. Moreover, the similarity of results across diabetic and non-diabetic samples suggests that research specifically for diabetic populations can build upon existing research on purpose using general or healthy samples.

Objective: Personality influences many aspects of the health process, including associations with possible mechanisms such as inflammation and health behaviors. It is currently unclear to what extent, if any, the Big Five personality traits uniquely impact later health through independent pathways of inflammatory biomarkers and health behaviors. Furthermore, it is unknown if this relationship varies for self- and informant-reports of personality. Methods: Using data from older adults (N = 1,630) enrolled in the St. Louis Personality and Aging Network study, we test whether self- and informant-reported personality (Big Five personality traits) show consistent associations with inflammation (i.e., IL-6, CRP, and TNF-α). Further, we tested whether inflammation and health behavior indirectly link personality to health outcomes through independent or shared pathways using longitudinal mediation in a structural equation modeling framework.Results: Self- and informant-reports of personality uniquely predicted future levels of inflammatory biomarkers (self bs range from -0.11 to 0.07; informant bs range from -0.15 to 0.11). Additionally, both reports of personality impacted health through biomarker and health behavior pathways. Effects were primarily found for conscientiousness (indirect effect bs range from 0.01 to 0.04) and neuroticism (indirect effect bs range from -0.01 to -0.02) and IL-6 and CRP were the biomarkers most repeatedly linked with the Big Five personality traits and health. Conclusions: Findings highlight the potential benefits of using of multiple assessments of personality and the importance of examining multiple, distinct pathways by which personality might influence later health in order to more fully understand the mechanisms underlying this relationship.