PERSONALITY TRAITS (. . .BUT NOT THE BIG FIVE) PREDICT THE ONSET OF DISEASE
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Date
2017-06-30
Authors
Condon, David M.
Mroczek, Daniel K.
Khan, A.
Weston, Sara J.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Abstract
The 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.
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1 page
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Citation
D.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/igx004.5054