Personality as a Marker of Health: a Comment on Bogg and Roberts

Excerpt

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to personality measurement, such as the much-studied type A personality or the focus on locus of control, have been replaced by the Big Five framework.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. …