Personality Traits Play a Role in Health and Longevity

A new research says our personality can affect our health and longevity of life.

The research was done by health psychologists from The University of Nottingham and the University of California in Los Angeles who examined the relationship between personality traits and expression of genes, which in turn control our immune system.

The team studied 121 healthy people comprised of 86 females and 35 males with an average age of 24 and average body mass index of 23. The participants  were required to fill up a questionnaire which measured five personality traits  -- extraversion, neuroticism, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness .The subjects were also questioned on lifestyle habits like smoking drinking, eating and exercising. Blood tests were done for gene expression analysis.

It was found that people's immune gene expression was linked to their personality traits of being extrovert or conscientious or less outgoing. This is not to say that people with negative emotions like depression had bad health. 

Professor Kavita Vedhara, research lead from The University of Nottingham's School of Medicine, said, reports Science Daily: "Our results indicated that 'extraversion' was significantly associated with an increased expression of pro-inflammatory genes and that 'conscientiousness' was linked to a reduced expression of pro-inflammatory genes. In other words, individuals who we would expect to be exposed to more infections as a result of their socially orientated nature (i.e., extraverts) appear to have immune systems that we would expect can deal effectively with infection. While individuals who may be less exposed to infections because of their cautious/conscientious dispositions have immune systems that may respond less well. We can't, however, say which came first. Is this our biology determining our psychology or our psychology determining our biology?"

The associations were independent of the  recorded behavior of the participants and also the presence of white blood cells responsible for the immunity in our body.

Expression of antiviral/antibody-related genes was not significantly associated with any personality dimension, the researchers said.

The researcher says that further investigation is needed to explore how this association is manifested biologically.