Personality as a Marker of Health: a Comment on Bogg and Roberts
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INVITED COMMENTARY
Personality as a Marker of Health: a Comment on Bogg and Roberts Sarah E. Hampson, Ph.D
Published online: 4 January 2013 # The Society of Behavioral Medicine 2013
In the past two decades, the study of the relation between personality and health has undergone nothing short of a revolution. Previous approaches to personality measurement, such as the much-studied type A personality or the focus on locus of control, have been replaced by the Big Five framework. The Big Five traits are all-encompassing, continuous dimensions of personality: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and intellect/openness [1]. Widely accepted in personality psychology as providing a comprehensive description of personality, measures of these five dimensions are readily available in short and long forms. As a consequence, it has become comparatively easy to include a personality assessment in health research and, because researchers are using comparable measures of the Big Five, findings are truly cumulative. One such finding, the association between conscientiousness and longevity, forms the basis for the article by Bogg and Roberts [2]. Now that this association has been identified in over 20 studies, this remarkable finding is in danger of becoming commonplace. Yet the initial discovery that a personality trait measured as early as age 10 predicts mortality, even after controlling for well-established risk factors such as gender and socioeconomic status, was a game changer for the field, and has led to an explosion of research on the relation between personality and health across the lifespan [3]. Bogg and Roberts provide a selection of the mounting evidence relating the dimension of conscientiousness (i.e., the degree to which a person is planful, selfcontrolled, and rule following) to numerous variables S. E. Hampson (*) Oregon Research Institute, 1776 Millrace Drive, Eugene, OR 97403 2536, USA e-mail: [email protected]
including diagnosed disease, risk factors for disease, stress, health-damaging behaviors, and social environmental support. They provide a compelling argument that, as a marker of health and longevity, this personality trait merits far wider integration into public health, epidemiological, and medical research. The inclusion of personality measurement more widely in health research would provide a broader and deeper understanding of the mechanisms by which personality traits contribute to health outcomes [4]. This understanding would inform the development of interventions to promote healthful personality traits and trait processes. Although personality research has now established that, far from being immutable, the Big Five undergo normative changes over the lifespan [5, 6], the idea of deliberately altering personality may seem far-fetched, or even downright sinister. However, psychotherapy and pharmacology have historically been moderately effective at changing personality, and Bogg and Roberts provide more recent evidence of the beneficial effects of these interventions
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