Do you know the type D personality? Discover how it influences us

There have been many attempts to list personality types and disorders throughout history, with mixed success and reception. We can find remote antecedents in the description of the four Hipcratic temperaments: the melancholic (pessimistic), the sanguine (optimistic), the choleric (irritable) and the phlegmatic (apathetic).

These temperaments were determined by the relative proportion of the four bodily humors (black bile, blood, yellow bile and phlegm). It is interesting to note that in the initial Greek theory of these temperaments The current attempts to discover the biogenetic bases of personality were already reflected.

What do we understand by personality?

We can talk about personality as a mixture of temperamental factors (determined by biology) and characteriological factors (determined by the environment). Thus, both heredity and environment influence each person’s personality.

There is a certain consensus when it comes to understanding personality as the union of two entities. These personality components would be the following:

Temper. It refers to the innate, genetic and constitutional influences that influence personality.Character. It refers to psychosocial, learned factors that influence personality. Much of character is formed throughout experience and the socialization process.

Personality and health

What does it depend on that, among all those people who have a certain genetic marker for a certain disease, some develop it and others do not? In this sense, The role that the individual’s personality plays in the predisposition and subsequent development of the disorder becomes relevant.

Is personality associated with certain psychophysiological response patterns? What psychophysiological patterns regulate predisposition to disease? The relationship between personality and illness, between the psychological and the physiological, is not easy to establish.; In fact, we still have many questions surrounding it.

Different personality or behavior patterns have been established to try to answer these questions.. Thus, models focused on personality traits, proposed by Suls and Rittenhouse (1990) attempt to explain the relationship between behavior and health based on the temperamental and character traits that determine the way people act.

Behavior patterns

The patterns of behavior or personality to which we were referring have been named with the letters A, C and d. Each of them carries certain health risks.

The Type A Behavior Pattern It is related to cardiovascular disorders. People with type C behavior pattern are more likely to develop cancer. Lastly, the type D behavior pattern (or type D personality) is associated with suffering from depression and anxiety, and they are more likely to contract coronary heart disease.

The type D personality

Type D personality is characterized by maximum containment of negative emotions. People who have this type of personality systematically inhibit their emotional expressiveness. They are also characterized by the consequent social inhibition. In addition, they often present subjective feelings of tension, anxiety, anger and sadness.

Social inhibition consists of the tendency to inhibit the expression of emotions in social interaction. For its part, negative affectivity is defined as a coping style that produces individual differences in psychological distress, somatic complaints, and self-concept.

This combination of negative affectivity and social inhibition is found in people with type D personality, which has a negative impact on their health. For example, it is proven that Depression and social inhibition are factors that can increase mortality from an acute coronary event.

Type D personality and coronary heart disease

As we can observe, type D personality is strongly associated with mortality in coronary patients. Those people who have already suffered a myocardial infarction and who have type D personality are at greater risk of suffering a second acute episode.

Besides, a type D personality can also indirectly promote coronary heart disease. This is possible thanks to harmful behaviors, such as tobacco consumption, sedentary lifestyle and alcohol consumption. A negative impact of this personality pattern is also observed on adherence to medical and psychological rehabilitation treatments.

On the other hand, it is noteworthy that a high level of chronic psychosocial stress in people with coronary heart disease type D would increase the risk of suffering from myocardial ischemia, ventricular arrhythmias and acute fatal events. In this way, type D personality is fundamentally characterized by being a predictor of long-term mortality from cardiovascular disorder. In different investigations, a mortality of 23% has been found in patients with type D personality and 7% in patients with another type of personality.

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