Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [224]
Among the more interesting developments in the field has been the study of the influence of personality on “well-being” (the general sense of contentment) in the middle and later years. Paul T. Costa and Robert R. McCrae, working with people enrolled in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, a long-running research project of the National Institute on Aging, found that extraverts, who score high on such traits as sociability, general activity, and “ascendance” (similar to dominance), were happier in midlife and beyond than most introverts. They also found that people who score low on neuroticism adapted better to the changes of middle age and old age than people who score high on neuroticism (measured by such traits as chronic anxiety, hostility, self-consciousness, and impulsiveness). The latter were likely to see the problems of middle age as a crisis, worry about their health, be frustrated and disappointed by retirement, and be at risk for depression and despair.83
What can one do to counteract such personality handicaps? Costa and McCrae suggested that psychotherapy could help, but to a limited extent, since the data of the Baltimore and other studies indicated that personality traits are relatively stable in adult life. Still, they said that even a modest improvement in well-being is as worthwhile as a modest improvement in the control of a serious physical disease.
Physical diseases of many kinds, according to much recent research, originate in or are exacerbated by certain traits of personality. Two important studies, appearing in 1975 and 1980, produced survey evidence that people with the so-called Type A personality (competitive, striving, hostile, and driven) are likely to develop coronary heart disease. Many later studies of the matter somewhat qualified but did not negate the finding.84
More generally, Martin Seligman and his colleagues Christopher Peterson and George Vaillant offered evidence in 1988 that one’s explanatory style affects one’s health. On the basis of data yielded by a thirty-five-year longitudinal study of Harvard graduates, they concluded that people who customarily have a pessimistic or negative interpretation of life fall ill more often than optimists and have shorter life expectancies. They saw psychotherapy—particularly short-term cognitive therapy—as a useful antidote. As we have already seen, Seligman has gone on to develop the doctrine that cognitive training can convert a negative explanatory style to a positive one, with beneficial effects on physical and mental health, this being the core of his present system of Positive Psychology.85
Hans Eysenck, reviewing the results of a number of personality and health studies, including some he himself conducted, said that the “dramatic results…point to a very strong connection between certain personalities and specific diseases.” He noted that many physicians have associated cancer-proneness with the inability to express anger, fear, or anxiety, and with feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, and depression, and that longitudinal studies show many of the same traits to be associated with heart disease. On the basis of these data, Eysenck and a collaborator, a Yugoslavian psychologist named Ronald Grossarth-Maticek, conducted an experiment in preventive medicine, with the following extraordinary results:
[We] tried to use behavior therapy to teach cancer- and heart disease–prone people to express their emotions more readily, to cope with stress, to wean them of their emotional dependencies, and to make them more self-reliant. In other words, we taught them to behave more like the healthier personality types.
100 people with cancer-prone personalities were divided into two groups: 50 who received no therapy and 50 who did receive it. After 13 years, 45 people who got therapy were still alive. Only 19 were alive in the no-therapy group.
We tried a similar experiment with 92 heart disease-prone people, divided into therapy and no-therapy groups.