Health: Do You Have a Healthy Personality?

By JESSICA KIDDLE

The type of personality you have can influence the ease with which you make friends, what qualities you look for in a partner and what type of career path you follow, but now scientists have discovered it can also have an impact on your health.

Doctors at Chicago’s Northwestern University have found that shy retiring types are more likely to die from a heart attack than their more socially adept counterparts. The study, which is believed to be the first of its kind, was presented at the American Heart Association Annual Scientific Sessions conference last month.

Using data from a separate study which followed the life-span of 2,000 male workers at the Western Electric plant in Chicago, researchers identified a link between social avoidance and cardiovascular disease.

“What we found was that those who would wait for others to approach them rather than strike up conversation themselves, and who were not ‘in’ on the gossip at work, were more likely to die from heart disease than any other illness,” explains cardiologist Dr Donald Lloyd-Jones, assistant professor of medicine at Northwestern University and co-author of the study.

“In the 1960s and 1970s there was a lot of interest in this Type- A personality (the more competitive, aggressive type) and the propensity for those people to develop coronary heart disease but that didn’t hang together very well in terms of a real personality type,” says Lloyd-Jones. “What we have now found is a real link between one specific trait and heart disease.”

As to why wallflowers might be more at risk of heart disease there is one theory that suggests that people who are less confident socially have extreme responses to certain social situations. For example, when entering a room full of people, their sympathetic nervous systems get more “revved up” than their more confident counterparts which may put a strain on their hearts.

“We don’t really know why social avoidance affects our chances of developing heart problems as opposed to our chances for getting cancer or other illnesses,” says Lloyd-Jones “but these results do highlight the need for further investigation into how our personalities can affect our health. We know how to treat affective disorders quite well now but personality traits are not necessarily amenable to pharmacological or talk therapy. But, if a trait such as social avoidance could be modified, it could have far-reaching consequences for treating the coronary-related diseases.”