Personality traits are robust predictors of health over the life span and behavioral choices connect personality to health. Personality characteristics predict whether individuals will engage in health-promoting or health-detrimental behaviors.

Our results indicate that personality features can influence several different daily emotional processes, i.e. average level, variability, subjective evaluation of daily incidents, and reactivity. Identifying these processes can shed light on individual differences in daily emotional life.

Being conscientious appears to be the best bet for good health among traits known as the “Big Five,” which are the basis for most psychological personality assessments. Along with conscientiousness, the Big Five include extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism and openness to experience.

Personalities are characterized in terms of traits, which are relatively enduring characteristics that influence our behaviour across many situations. Personality traits such as introversion, friendliness, conscientiousness, honesty, and helpfulness are important because they help explain consistencies in behaviour.

Relative to other personality dimensions, people higher in neuroticism tend to react to stress with greater distress and anxiety and report encountering more stressors in their environment (Wearing and Hart 1996).

Are You Type B? The type B personality is often assessed by looking at the exclusion of type A traits. People who are low in characteristics and behaviors that are typical of the type A personality are often then considered a type B.

Four temperaments

• The four temperament theory is a proto-psychological theory which suggests that there are four fundamental personality types: sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic.
• Temperament theory has its roots in the ancient theory of humourism.

Individuals differ dramatically in their response to a problem or a stressor. Some people are born with a temperament that predisposes them to higher or lower levels of tolerance to stress. Your cognitive reaction to a situation plays a role in determining how stressful a situation is to you.

Personality has been shown to affect exposure to a stressor, influencing the nature and severity of stressor experiences [ Relations between personality and coping: a meta-analysis.

One factor associated with both stress resilience and health outcomes is personality. An understanding of how personality influences responses to acute stress may shed light upon individual differences in susceptibility to chronic stress-linked disease.

YOUR STRESS PERSONALITY IS: When you’re stressed you tend to freak out and catastrophize the situation. You’re probably “threat-sensitive” and easily overwhelmed. You may tend to be anxious and worry a lot.

Feelings of stress are normally triggered by things happening in your life which involve: being under lots of pressure. facing big changes. worrying about something. not having much or any control over the outcome of a situation.

The hypothesis describes Type A individuals as outgoing, ambitious, rigidly organized, highly status-conscious, impatient, anxious, proactive, and concerned with time management. People with Type A personalities are often high-achieving “workaholics”.

Personality traits reflect people’s characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. Personality traits imply consistency and stability—someone who scores high on a specific trait like Extraversion is expected to be sociable in different situations and over time.

The five broad personality traits described by the theory are extraversion (also often spelled extroversion), agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism.

Tough’s book outlines seven character traits that he says are key to success:

• Grit.
• Curiosity.
• Self-control.
• Social intelligence.
• Zest.
• Optimism.
• Gratitude.

There are three criteria that are characterize personality traits: (1) consistency, (2) stability, and (3) individual differences. To have a personality trait, individuals must be somewhat consistent across situations in their behaviors related to the trait.