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Over the past few decades, a growing body of research has established a link between personality traits and health-related mechanisms, behaviors, and outcomes. Numerous models have been proposed to explain how personality can affect health through processes such as physiological responses, preventative and risky health behaviors, coping mechanisms, and shared genetic risk and resilience ...
Potential interventions aimed at single or multiple aspects of personality could include changing the underlying cognitive or psychological processes associated with particular traits (i.e., creativity, responsibility), the physiological responses to stress (i.e., dampening stress reactivity of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis), or the health behaviors associated with particular ...
- Basic Personality Dimensions
- Meta-Analysis on The Relations Between HEXACO Dimensions and Health
- Mental Health
- Health Behavior
- Physical Health
- Comparing HEXACO and Big Five/Five-Factor Dimensions
- What Can We Learn from this?
A large body of research on personality traits rests on the assumption that personality traits are engrained in the language that we use, which is called the lexical approach to personality. Accordingly, individuals use different adjectives to describe the behaviors, tendencies, and characteristics of themselves and others, and these adjectives can...
Recently, led by Jan Luca Pletzer and Isabel Thielmann, we summarized the findings of previous studies linking the HEXACO dimensions with various health outcomes in a meta-analysis. In line with previous research, we grouped these health outcomes into three broad health categories: Mental health (reflecting cognitive, emotional, and social well-bei...
The key finding for mental health was that it showed strong links with Extraversion. More precisely, people with higher levels of Extraversion tend to experience many positive emotions, be resilient, and have high levels of self-esteem. They are also much less likely to experience symptoms of burnout or depressioncompared to people with low levels ...
Having higher levels of honesty-humility, conscientiousness, as well as agreeableness vs. anger was related to engaging in healthy behavior. Individuals with respective personality characteristics were found to be less likely to be aggressive, engage in risky behavior, smoke, and drink alcohol. Interestingly, Extraversion was not strongly associate...
In contrast to mental health and health behavior, the associations of the HEXACO domains with physical health were largely weak and non-significant. Only two domains were significantly, yet weakly, related to physical health. Emotionality was negatively related to physical health, mostly because individuals with higher levels in this domain tend to...
We also examined whether Honesty-Humility, the domain that represents the most obvious difference between the HEXACO and the Big Five/Five-Factor approach, related to the health outcomes over and above the Big Five domains. Past research has found this to be the case, especially for antisocial, counterproductive, and prosocial behaviors. In the hea...
Personality is an important predictor of (mental) health. For mental health, we found particularly strong links with Extraversion but also links with higher levels of conscientiousness, agreeableness vs. anger, and honesty-humility, as well as lower levels of emotionality. Understanding these relations can have far-reaching implications for healthc...
Wave 1 personality traits were related to Wave 2 NA reactivity and Wave 3 health outcomes. Specifically, higher levels of neuroticism were associated with greater NA reactivity to daily stressors, and higher levels of conscientiousness, openness, and extraversion were associated with lower NA reactivity.
The evidence that personality traits are associated with health behaviors and health outcomes is overwhelming, and research is now focusing on explaining these associations. The field has only just begun to consider the implications of these advances for improving health at the individual and population levels.
Oct 1, 2015 · These kinds of studies move us away from asking questions relating to if traits are associated with health outcomes, to questions concerning how traits are associated with health outcomes. We consider the roles of new data collection and analytic methods, and the potential for studies of traits and health to inform interventions for improving health at an individual and societal level.
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Are personality traits associated with health outcomes?
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Do traits affect health?
How do childhood personality traits influence adult health status?
Oct 9, 2018 · While associations between personality and health outcomes are well established, the pathways connecting them remain largely unknown. Future studies need to focus on study designs that can better address the developmental patterns, mediating pathways, and causality in explaining why personality traits are associated with health.
