Validity of the Grossarth-Maticek and Eysenck personality-stress model of disease: An empirical prospective cohort study
Section snippets
Background
The Short Interpersonal Reactions Inventory (SIRI) – a shortened version of the Personality-Stress Inventory (PSI) constructed by Grossarth-Maticek, Eysenck, Vetter, and Schmidt (1988), and further developed by Grossarth-Maticek and Eysenck (1990, 1991) measures a disease-prone personality typology. Beyond introversion-related stress (Saklofske & Eysenck. 2004), the personality-stress model proposes six disease-prone personality subtypes (measured via the SIRI/PSI), each having a characteristic
Older Australians’ study
A self-report study into health status among older people was carried out between 1993 and 1996 (Kirk & Martin, 1998; Mosing, Medland & McRae, 2012). Participants gave informed consent to the data collection and storage. This project was approved in accordance with the National Health and Medical Research Council's National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/about-us/publications/national-statement-ethical-conduct-human-research-2007-updated-2018) by both
Results and discussion
The distributions of scores are shown in Table 1 and Fig. 1, with all subtype pairs being significantly correlated (Table 2).
Results of survival analysis, adjusted for sex, are in shown in Table 3, and results after additional adjustment for body mass index (BMI), alcohol intake and smoking status in Table 4. Some 99% of deaths during the follow-up period took place more than one year, and 97% more than five years, after the initial questionnaire survey.
The survival analysis reveals that SIRI
Ethical statement
The study was granted ethical clearance by the Queensland Institute of Medical Research NHMRC Human Research Ethics Committee. The authors report no conflicts of interest.
Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the important contributions of Richard Parker in organizing the NDI search and Judith Symmons in checking the matched results from the search. We also acknowledge and appreciate the willingness of study participants to complete the questionnaire. Participants were contacted originally through the Australian Twin Registry. The original questionnaire study and the more recent NDI searches were funded by donations from J. George Landers, independent researcher, Melbourne and Souda
References (40)
Psychological stress and cardiovascular disease
Journal of the American College of Cardiology
(2008)- et al.
Personality, stress and mental health: Evidence of relationships in a sample of Iranian managers
Personality and Individual Differences
(2000) - et al.
Self-regulation and mortality from cancer, coronary heart disease, and other causes: A prospective study
Personality and Individual Differences
(1995) - et al.
Method of test administration as a factor in test validity: The use of a personality questionnaire in the prediction of cancer and coronary heart disease
Behaviour Research and Therapy
(1995) - et al.
The short interpersonal reactions inventory, self-regulation and differentiation scales in an older Australian twin sample
Personality and Individual Differences
(1998) - et al.
A psychometric evaluation of the Short Interpersonal Reactions Inventory (SIRI) in an Australian twin sample
Personality and Individual Differences
(1995) - et al.
Association of psychosocial risk factors with risk of acute myocardial infarction in 11119 cases and 13648 controls from 52 countries (the Interheart study): Case-control study
The Lancet
(2004) Personality, stress-reactions and disease
Personality and Individual Differences
(1992)- Australian National Death Index (NDI) (2020)....
- et al.
Translating questionnaires and inventories using a cross-cultural translation technique
Journal of Teaching in Physical Education
(2000)
Low job control and risk of coronary heart disease in Whitehall II (prospective cohort) study
British Medical Journal
Measures of personality and social psychological constructs
Assessment of ‘Cancer-prone personality’ characteristics in healthy study subjects and in patients with breast disease and breast cancer using the commitment questionnaire: A prospective case-control study in Finland
Anticancer Research
Personality, cancer and cardiovascular disease: A causal analysis
Journal of Psychosomatic Research
Reply to criticisms of the Grossarth-Maticek studies
Psychological Inquiry
Smoking, personality and stress: Psychosocial factors in the prevention of cancer and coronary heart disease
Personality, stress, smoking, and genetic predisposition as synergistic risk factors for cancer and coronary heart disease
Integrative Physiological and Behavioral Science
Personality and disease: Overview, review and preview
Psychosocial risk factors for coronary heart disease
Medical Journal of Australia
Personality, stress and disease: Description and validation of a new inventory
Psychological Reports
Cited by (4)
Matters arising from Whitfield, J.B., Landers, J.G., Martin, N.G. & Boyle, G.J. (2020). Validity of the Grossarth-Maticek and Eysenck personality-stress model of disease: An empirical prospective cohort study. Personality and Individual Differences, 109797
2021, Personality and Individual DifferencesA bibliometric analysis of H. J. Eysenck's research output: Clarifying controversy
2021, Personality and Individual DifferencesCitation Excerpt :This issue is yet not resolved. On one side, there is some recent evidence to lend support to some of their claims (Whitfield, Landers, Martin, & Boyle, 2020), on the other, there are calls for a greater number of articles to be examined, including manuscripts where Eysenck is the sole author (Marks, 2019). Of the articles identified by Marks (2019) that are in our corpus, the bibliometric coupling analysis place them in the same cluster as those deemed “unsafe” by the enquiry at King's Collage London (2019), a result that adds further support to scrutinize Eysenck's work from this period of time and areas of study.
Enneagram typologies and healthy personality to psychosocial stress: A network approach
2022, Frontiers in Psychology