Personality and Well-being

Key Goals of Health Psychology

  • Prevent health problems before they start.
  • Shorten the time people spend living with disease.
  • Diseases are, to some degree, inevitable.

Compression of Morbidity

  • Morbidity: the presence of disease.
    • Morbidity Model: Develops disease at age 50 and dies at age 60.
    • Life Extension: Develops disease and life is prolonged, but lives with the disease for a longer period.
    • Compression of Morbidity: Prevents disease through healthy lifestyle choices, developing it much later (e.g., age 75) and spending only the last few years of life dealing with it.
  • Compression of morbidity = extend the healthspan.
  • How? Prevention.
  • Prevention: Trying to stop something from occurring before it occurs.
  • Intervention: Something has already occurred, and you are trying to fix it.

Focus on Treatment vs. Prevention

  • Medicine (and the US healthcare system) tends to focus on treatment rather than prevention.
  • Early warning signs of disease often go undetected.

Three Types of Prevention

  • Primary Prevention: Health-enhancing efforts to prevent injury from occurring (e.g., wearing sunscreen).
  • Secondary Prevention: Actions taken to treat an illness early in its occurrence (e.g., annual skin checks at the dermatologist).
  • Tertiary Prevention: Treatment after someone experiences an event (e.g., surgery to remove skin cancer).

Common Factor in Prevention

  • Health behaviors.
  • Failure to establish good health habits may increase health risks throughout life.
  • The earlier you start engaging in healthier habits, the better.
  • It can be harder to engage in healthier habits later in life.

Overarching Framework

  • Health Behavior Model of Personality-Health (Smith, 2006).
    • Primary theories used in research.
    • Includes health behaviors and personality as a predictor of who engages in them.
    • Predicts risk for illness.

Health Behaviors

  • Actions people take that can improve, maintain, or harm their health.
    • Examples: Exercise, sleep, using sunscreen, drinking alcohol, smoking, taking prescriptions as directed, eating nutritious meals, using a seatbelt, etc.

Characteristics of Health Behaviors

  • Can have positive or negative impacts on health (e.g., exercise (+) vs. smoking (-)).
  • Occur on a continuum (e.g., no physical activity to excessive physical activity; moderation is key).
  • May have short-term, long-term, and/or interactive effects (e.g., taking prescriptions as directed (short-term), exercising (long-term), drinking and smoking (interactive)).
  • Those that become firmly established and automatically performed are considered health habits (e.g., brushing your teeth).

Alameda Health Study

  • People who engage in more healthy behaviors live longer.

Origins of Health Behaviors/Habits

  • Individual-Level Factors: Personality tendencies, biology/physiology.
  • Social Factors: Health habits are often learned from parents, siblings, peers, and others who model health behaviors.
  • Sociocultural and Structural Factors: Culture, health education, type of healthcare system.

Health Behavior Model of Personality-Health (Smith, 2006)

  • Personality
    • People differ from one another.
    • Personality broadly refers to people’s consistent patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
    • Personality is consistent over time and across situations.
    • Does NOT mean you act the same way in every situation or that personality is fixed.
    • Example: If you are extraverted as a kid, you are likely to continue being extraverted.
    • Is relatively stable – compared to other people you are consistent.
    • Personality predicts real-world outcomes, including work, relationships, and health.

Levels of Personality

  • Traits, motives, goals, narratives, etc.
  • Focus on personality traits.
  • The most commonly used structure and assessment of personality traits is the Big Five.

Big Five Dimensions

  • Personality and health
  • Most robust associations between personality and physical health include:
    • Conscientiousness: Positively related to health.
      • High C people:
        • Have lower levels of inflammation (e.g., IL-6).
        • Engage in healthier behaviors (exercise, eating healthy).
        • Avoid risky behaviors (drinking, smoking).
        • Are at reduced risk for disease (e.g., Alzheimer's).
        • Live longer.
    • Neuroticism: Negatively related to health.
      • High N people:
        • Have higher levels of inflammation.
        • Do not engage in as many healthy behaviors.
        • Are more likely to engage in risky behaviors.
        • Are at increased risk for disease.
        • Do not live as long.
      • “Healthy neuroticism?”
    • Extraversion:
      • Most often related to unhealthy risk behaviors like drinking, but also healthy behaviors like exercising.
      • Less replicable associations with health.
      • Most often related to risky health behaviors, like binge drinking.
      • But also related to healthy behaviors, like exercise.

Wellbeing

  • Two types:
    • Hedonic: Feeling happy and high positive affect.
      • E.g., happiness, life satisfaction.
    • Eudaimonic: Feeling a sense of meaning, purpose, and fulfillment.
      • E.g., psychological wellbeing, purpose, self-actualization.
  • A health outcome in and of itself.
    • An outcome that we are striving for.
    • Also, a cause of physical health and an outcome of physical health.
    • Health psychologists are striving towards wellbeing.
    • Wellbeing also predicts health behaviors.
  • Also, a cause and consequence of physical health outcomes and longevity.

Wellbeing and Dementia Example

  • People with higher hedonic wellbeing report better health, have fewer chronic health conditions, and live longer.
  • People with a greater sense of purpose are more resilient to the brain pathology that causes dementia.
  • Increases in sense of purpose across time are associated with less steep cognitive decline in older adulthood.

How and Why?

  • Promotes positive health behaviors.
    • People who are happier and feel more sense of purpose engage in health-protective behaviors.
  • Buffers against stress.
    • People who are happy and feel more sense of purpose tend to appraise events differently and have better immune, cardiovascular, and neuroendocrine functioning compared to people who are less happy and purposeful.
  • Social relationships.
    • People who are happier and feel more sense of purpose are better able to promote and sustain beneficial social relationships.

Health Behavior Model of Wellbeing-Health

  • Theories of health behavior

Theories of Health Behavior

  • How and why do people engage or not engage in health behaviors?
    • Health Belief Model (HBM).
    • Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB).

Health Belief Model

  • Decisions about health behavior are based on four interacting factors that influence perceptions about health threat:
    • Perceived susceptibility.
    • Perceived severity of health threat.
    • Perceived benefits of (and barriers to) treatment.
    • Cues to action.
      • Things like advice from other people (could be a doctor/family/friend) and shapes our perceptions.
      • This model shows how some of these different preventive factors (e.g., personality) influence each of the 4 factors that predict whether we engage in a particular behavior or not.

Theory of Planned Behavior

  • Factors shaping behavior interventions:
    • Attitude toward behavior.
    • Subjective norm regarding the behavior.
    • Perceived behavioral control over the behavior.
  • Specifies relationships among attitudes and behaviors.
  • Personality affects the types of attitudes that you hold and the norms you are subject to, which then shapes your behavior.
  • Suggests measuring behavioral intention is the best way to predict the occurrence of health behavior.
  • Is most accurate in predicting goal-oriented, rational behaviors.