Condon, David M.Mroczek, Daniel K.Khan, A.Weston, Sara J.2022-07-132022-07-132017-06-30D.M. Condon, S.J. Weston, A. Khan, D.K. Mroczek, PERSONALITY TRAITS (. . .BUT NOT THE BIG FIVE) PREDICT THE ONSET OF DISEASE , Innovation in Aging, Volume 1, Issue suppl_1, July 2017, Page 1374, https://doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igx004.5054https://hdl.handle.net/1794/27451https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6184177/1 pageThe utility of personality measures as predictors of distal outcomes (e.g., mortality, longevity) is well-documented. Few have reported on more proximal outcomes; one prominent exception (Weston, Hill, & Jackson, 2014) considered personality predictors of chronic disease onset. We report here on efforts to (1) replicate their findings in a second cohort of participants from the Health and Retirement Study and (2) extend their analyses to evaluate the effects of socioeconomic factors. For 7 chronic diseases and the Big Five scales, the only significant measure in both samples when controlling for SES was Openness as a protective factor in the development of a heart condition. SES, by contrast, was a significant predictor in more than one-third of the models. We also demonstrate methods for empirically deriving outcome-specific scales with substantially improved predictive utility and advocate for broader use of these methods when prediction is more important than taxonomic description.enCreative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0-USArticlehttps://doi.org/10.1093%2Fgeroni%2Figx004.5054