Can my personality make me sick?

Question 1

How are people dying now compared to before?

Answer 1

• people used to die of infectious disease

- now dying of cancer, other diseases that can have behavioral components

Question 2

How does personality affect your health?

Answer 2

• personality shapes health behavior (risk exposure)

- personality shapes physiology (host resistance)

Question 3

What are ways in which personality can affect risk exposure

Answer 3

• seek behaviors that are detrimental to health (drinking, drugs, other appetitive behaviors–drive towards sensation, novelty)
• how we notice/react to symptoms (anxiety/depression patients more likely to notice symptoms, go to doctor more)
• exposure to others (extroversion)

Question 4

Conscientiousness versus impulsiveness and risk exposure

Answer 4

-conscientious: better patient, follow doctor/medication orders, also longer life and less risk for disease

Question 5

Introversion versus extroversion

Answer 5

• both risk exposure and host resistance affected
• extroversion: more exposure, but also more resistant
• introversion: not as much exposure but also more vulnerable
• diseases that are “social” track more strongly on extroverted people
• Cohen: infect with virus
  
  • introverts more likely to develop symptoms (2-3x)

Question 6

How can personality lead to disease?

Answer 6

• gene expression can lead to disease
• personality can influence gene expression (through experience)
  
  • perceptions (habits of perception), how we view the world

Question 7

Experienced self

Answer 7

-stable independent model of self

Question 8

Molecular self

Answer 8

• fluid, regenerative, permeable
• genes respond to environment, which changes gene expression and can affect function of cell (and therefore health)
• beliefs about the world affect how we react to things in our environment

Question 9

How does social experience affect gene expression?

Answer 9

• the way people interpret their environment can modulate gene expression
• people interpreting environment to be lonely show different gene expression from those who feel integrated

Question 10

How does the fight or flight influence immune response?

Answer 10

• increases bacterial response

- decreases antiviral response

Question 11

How does the HPA axis influence our immune response?

Answer 11

• decreases bacterial response
• decrease antiviral
• extreme stress, trauma

Question 12

How does isolation/loneliness affect our immune response?

Answer 12

• more risk for predation (evolutionarily), so increase bacterial response
• but don’t necessarily need this response (less at risk of wounds/bacterial infection)

Question 13

How do different personalities differ in inflammatory responses?

Answer 13

• extroverts: increased inflammatory gene expression (bacterial)
• conscientious: decreased inflammatory gene expression
• even when controlling for behavior and negative affect

Question 14

Gene expression can change according to how we interpret the world

Answer 14

• in stressful situations, protective expression decreased in monkeys
• extroverted monkeys showed less of a negative response in a stressful situation
• extroversion was protective

Question 15

Example of how genome regulates experience (rats) (?)

Answer 15

-rats in social isolation

about 10% of genome changed as a result of social isolation