Personality Types (AQA A Level Psychology): Revision Note

Personality types A, B & C

• Research suggests that personality may explain individual differences in response to stress

• Psychologists (see below) developed a theory of personality types to describe people sharing similar traits and became interested in possible connections between personality types and different stress-related illnesses

Personality type A

• Friedman & Rosenman (1959) were cardiologists who suspected that their patients, who mostly had coronary heart disease (CHD), shared common personality characteristics

  • They hypothesised that CHD was associated with a certain pattern of behaviour, which they called Type A personality

• Friedman (1996) later described Type A in terms of three major groups of behaviours, with people high in Type A demonstrating high levels of

  • competitiveness - driven, achievement-motivated, ambitious, aware of their own and other people's status, viewing life in terms of challenges, goals and targets

  • time urgency - fast-talking, impatient, determinedly proactive, viewing creative pursuits as a waste of time, with a distinct preference for multi-tasking

  • hostility - aggressive, intolerant, inflexible and quick to anger

Personality type B

• Friedman & Rosenman also identified a ‘Type B’ personality, with very different characteristics from Type A

  • Tolerant and laid back

  • Reflective and less competitive than Type A

  • Tending to enjoy recreation

  • Do not feel guilty about relaxing

• People with Type B personality characteristics were much less likely to suffer from CHD or other stress-related illnesses

Personality type C

• Temoshok (1987) identified Type C personality, describing people memorably as manifesting pathological niceness — they are people pleasers, compliant, patient beyond all reason, passive and self-sacrificing

• Because Type Cs sit above all else to avoid conflict, they frequently achieve this by repressing their emotions, including anger, and it is this behaviour that is thought to be especially relevant to cancer-proneness

Hardiness (commitment, challenge & control)

• Kobasa (1979) proposed hardiness as a personality type combining a strong commitment to self, an attitude of vigorousness towards the environment, a sense of meaningfulness and an internal locus of control

• Kobasa developed this theory to explain individual differences in the reaction to stress that had been overlooked in earlier research by Holmes & Rahe and others, who failed to account for the fact that not everyone exposed to a very high level of stress became ill

• Hardy individuals possess the following personality traits:

  • Commitment to self – having a clear sense of one’s values, goals, and capabilities, and a belief in their importance

  • Challenge – viewing change as expected and normal, and perceiving stressors as challenges to be mastered

  • Control – having an internal locus of control and thus feeling that one has power over decisions and situations, and power over how one meets challenges

• The above personality traits combine to reduce the effect of stressors that may make less hardy individuals ill

Research which investigates the role of personality types

• The Western Collaborative Group Study (WCGS) was Friedman & Rosenman's prospective study of over 3,000 healthy men aged 39 to 59 in California, who were medically assessed as free of CHD at the start and then assessed for personality type using 25 questions in a structured interview

  • Eight and a half years later (Friedman & Rosenman, 1974), 257 men had developed CHD, of whom 70% had been assessed at the start of the study as Type A, almost twice as many as the Type Bs who developed CHD, even when known CHD risk factors were accounted for

• Dattore et al. (1980) studied 200 veterans of the Vietnam War, 75 of whom were cancer patients and the rest a control group with non-cancer diagnoses, who had all completed scales measuring repression of emotions and symptoms of depression several years before they were diagnosed

  • The cancer patients reported significantly greater emotional repression and fewer depression symptoms than the non-cancer controls, and as this was a prospective study it provides evidence of a link between Type C and cancer-proneness

• Westman (1990) gave officer cadets a stress questionnaire at the start and finish of a challenging training course and found that those displaying characteristics of hardiness experienced less perceived stress than their colleagues, which supports Kobasa’s theory

Evaluation of personality types

Strengths

• Understanding the relationship between Type A personality factors and stress can help people reduce their risky work-driven, time-conscious and stress-inducing attitudes and behaviour

• Egido et al. (2012) studied 150 Spanish men and women under 65 years old who had had a stroke, and compared them with a matched control group, finding that those who had had a stroke were significantly more likely to have Type A personalities

  • This was true of men and women and could not be explained by traditional lifestyle-associated risk factors such as smoking and diet, and as recent research continues to support the view that Type A plays a role in cardiovascular disease, this suggests the concept has some validity

Limitations

• Psychologists eventually realised that Type A as a global personality construct is much too broad and encompasses too many different traits, so researchers subsequently focused on the hostility component in linking stress and CHD

  • Dembroski et al. (1989) reanalysed the WCGS data and found that ratings of hostility significantly predicted later incidence of CHD

  • This casts doubt on the validity of the global conception of Type A, but does support the view that some aspect of Type A personality is involved in CHD

• Data was generated mainly through self-report questionnaires and was correlational, which means that it cannot account for other factors that may be responsible for CHD

Issues & Debates

• Personality traits such as Type A, B, C and hardiness are often seen as innate, supporting the nature side of the nature vs nurture debate

  • However, responses to stress and the development of personality can also be shaped by life experiences, environment and learning, highlighting a nurture influence

• The classification of people into broad personality types (A, B, C) represents a nomothetic approach, applying general laws to explain behaviour

  • While useful for prediction, this may overlook individual complexity and differences in how people react to stress