Personality Traits Predict the Onset of Disease

Abstract

While personality traits have been linked concurrently to health status and prospectively to outcomes such as mortality, it is currently unknown whether traits predict the diagnosis of a number of specific diseases (e.g., lung disease, heart disease, and stroke) that may account for their mortality effects more generally. A sample ( N = 6,904) of participants from the Health and Retirement Study, a longitudinal study of older adults, completed personality measures and reported on current health conditions. Four years later, participants were followed up to see if they developed a new disease. Initial cross-sectional analyses replicated past findings that personality traits differ across disease groups. Longitudinal logistic regression analyses predicting new disease diagnosis suggest that traits are associated with the risk of developing disease—most notably the traits of conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness. Findings are discussed as a means to identify pathways between personality and health.

Maladaptive Personality Traits and 10-Year Course of Psychiatric and Medical Symptoms and Functional Impairment Following Trauma

“…As hypothesized, negative affectivity was associated with initial levels of PTSD symptoms and impaired mental functioning, but not to initial physical symptoms or functional impairment. Negative affectivity is akin to neuroticism by reflecting a tendency to experience negative emotions and poor coping, and the current results are in line with the previous research which identified neuroticism as a risk factor for psychiatric illness in general [10,12,28,32,61]. One mechanisms linking negative affectivity to worse PTSD and mental functioning could be heightened sensitivity to negative stimuli, such as biased processing of threat information [85][86][87][88].…”

“…Therefore, it is plausible that WTC responders with personality traits linked to neuroticism, agreeableness and psychoticism might have more severe PTSD symptoms. Furthermore, low conscientiousness and high neuroticism were identified as significant vulnerability factors for respiratory problems, even when accounting for smoking, physical activity and comorbid chronic diseases such as cardiovascular and psychiatric disorders [59][60][61]. Neuroticism also contributes to the severity of GERD symptoms [62][63][64].…”

How do people respond to health news? The role of personality traits

“…For example, our findings indicate that a patient who is low on neuroticism may be less likely to seek out information about his or her medical condition; thus, a physician may want to spend more time reviewing the important details of that condition and its treatments. This low cost form of personalized medicine adds to the benefits of including personality in health care settings for preventative reasons, given that personality traits are known risk factors for chronic disease and health status (Weston, Hill & Jackson, 2014). Together, a patient's personality scores can be used to guide physicians in targeting patients who require more screening prior to a health event and specific behavioral changes after the event occurs.…”

“…Personality traits are the ideal candidate to influence these types of decision processes, as personality traits are known to affect physical health and health behaviors. Personality traits predict longevity across many decades (Jackson et al, 2015) and prospectively predict disease onset (Jokela et al, 2013;Weston, Hill & Jackson, 2014). The intervening mechanisms linking personality to these outcomes are largely health behaviors and stress (Hampson et al, 2015;Lodi-Smith et al, 2010).…”

Reconsidering what is vital about vital signs in electronic health records: Comment on Matthews et al. (2016).

“…This issue is particularly discriminatory against measures that are relevant only for narrowly-defined health contexts or specific populations. As evidence, consider how personality traits differentially predict disease onset based on the ailment of interest (Weston, Hill, & Jackson, 2014). Despite the wealth of evidence in support of personality as a predictor of health (e.g., Hampson, 2012), this differential predictive value might single-handedly eliminate personality traits from future inclusion.…”