Our personality determines how we interact with the outside world, build our lives, cope with stress. Is there a link between personality traits and health?
The nature and type of personality determines how we build our lives, interact with others, climb the career ladder and cope with various situations. Is there a relationship between personality traits and health status? Psychologists from the USA and Great Britain tried to discover it.
The study, the results of which were published in the journal Psychoneuroendochrinology, involved 121 people. At the beginning of the experiment, the scientists determined the extent to which each of the participants expressed the main personal qualities (extroversion, anxiety, openness, compliance, conscientiousness, caution). Blood samples were then taken from the participants to identify genetic factors that have a direct impact on the body’s immune system*.
After examining the data, the scientists found interesting coincidences. It turned out that a blood test of open, sociable people demonstrates that they have a strong immune system. And the owners of a weak immune system turned out to be more among the subjects, distinguished by conscientiousness and caution. Contrary to expectations, the researchers found no evidence that only negative personality traits (such as anxiety) have a bad effect on immunity.
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University of Nottingham School of Medicine Professor Kavita Vedhara, who led the study, explained the results: “Analysis of data from the study shows that extraversion was associated with increased expression of pro-inflammatory genes that are part of the immune system. Such a character trait as conscientiousness, on the contrary, reduced the expression of pro-inflammatory genes.
In other words, people who, in our opinion, should have been exposed to more frequent attacks of infections due to their socially oriented nature (i.e. extroverts), turned out to have strong immune systems that were able to effectively fight viruses. While cautious in every sense, the participants in the study could not boast of strong immunity.
However, according to Professor Vedhara, it is difficult to say what is the cause and what is the effect here. Perhaps the immune system of sociable people adapts to numerous social contacts with others (the more contacts, the greater the risk of infection transmitted from person to person). At the same time, strong immunity, which has a positive effect on well-being, can be a condition conducive to leading an active lifestyle.
* K. Vedhara et al. «Personality and gene expression: Do individual differences exist in the leukocyte transcriptome?», Psychoneuroendochrinology, November 2014.
** J. Dean «The Personality Trait Linked To The Strongest Immune System», PsyBlog, December 2014.