Personality, health behaviours and physical health in young adulthood

Abstract

Objective

Personality traits and health are strongly correlated, but unobserved family-level characteristics may confound this relationship. This study investigates whether associations between personality traits and physical health are spurious owing to unobserved family background.

Design

Participants were from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. This study employed sibling fixed-effect approach to account for unobserved family characteristics.

Main outcome measures

Main dependent variables were Framingham Risk Scores for 30-year full cardiovascular disease (CVD) and metabolic syndrome.

Results

Sibling fixed-effects models showed that conscientiousness is associated with reductions in CVD risk and metabolic syndrome, and that neuroticism is associated with an increase in both conditions. A higher extraversion score is positively associated with CVD risk. The adverse effect of extraversion on CVD risk is larger among females, and the protective effect of conscientiousness is larger among males. Moreover, while extraversion, neuroticism and conscientiousness are associated with health behaviours in somewhat distinct ways, the associations for agreeableness and openness are spurious owing to unobserved family background.

Conclusion

This study ruled out the concern that unobserved family background drives the personality-physical health link. Mechanisms linking personality to physical health may be gendered.

Acknowledgments

This research uses data from Add Health, a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and funded by grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Special acknowledgment is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health website (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth). No direct support was received from grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health website (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth). The restricted-use data that support the findings of this study were obtained through a contractual agreement.