Dimensions of health-related dispositions in elderly people: relationships with health behaviour and personality traits

Abstract

The principal aim of this study was to examine a health‐related disposition construct in elderly Italians by explorative factor analysis of the Multidimensional Health Questionnaire. The questionnaire had a two‐factor structure. The first factor was loaded by cognitive variables such as Health‐Efficacy, Health Control, Optimism, etc.; it predicted compliance with self‐rating health seeking behaviours and it was correlated with personality traits such as Emotional Stability and the Lie scale. The second factor comprised emotional dispositions including Health Anxiety, Health Depression, Health Preoccupation, etc. and it was negatively associated with Conscientiousness and Energy. Interesting results emerged for sex by age differences in both health factors. Moreover, men and women showed different correlation patterns between the health factors and the Five Factor Model. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Role of Coping Resources on Change in Well-Being During Persistent Health Decline

“…Our findings support Bandura's (1997) claim that a strong sense of efficacy enhances well-being also when physical capacities decrease as people age. Furthermore, Artistico, Baldassarri, Lauriola, and Laicardi (2000) stated that older people with physical impairments and with a low sense of efficacy do not try to manage their health and have a low quality of life.…”

“…However, the contribution of self-esteem to the explanation of the association between PDF and positive affect was the smallest of three coping resources. In addition, Artistico (2000) showed that increasing severity of disease was associated with progressively lower self-esteem, and decreasing levels of self-esteem were associated with increased perceptions of illness. Our findings as well as recent studies by others have shown that health problems lead to a lower sense of mastery, which in turn leads to lower well-being (Schuurmans, 2004).…”

Personality-related problems in living: An empirical approach.

“…This has been shown with convergent and discriminant validation in self-report, peer ratings, and spouse ratings (McCrae, Stone, Fagan, & Costa, 1998), temporal stability (McCrae & Costa, 2003;Roberts & DelVecchio, 2000), generalizability across age, gender, and culture (McCrae & Allik, 2002), and heritability (Yamagata et al, 2006). The FFM has also been used successfully as an integrative model for personality description in a number of applied fields, including health psychology (Artistico, Baldassarri, Lauriola & Laicardi, 2000) and industrial organizational psychology (Hogan & Holland, 2003) as well as developmental research such as child and adolescent temperament research (Caspi, Roberts, & Shiner, 2005) and aging (Costa, McCrae & Siegler, 1999).…”

Dispositional and Contextual Variables Impacting Interventions With Women Later in Life

“…People who are higher in optimism have been demonstrated to have higher levels of motivation, persistence and performance (Burke, Joyner, Czech, & Wilson, 2000), positive psychological characteristics and health promoting behaviours, self-esteem and use of adaptive coping strategies (Scheier et al, 1999). Optimism has been shown to predict better medical outcomes (Scheier et al, 1999), and to predict longevity and physician ratings of health (Artistico, Baldassarri, Lauriola, &. Laicardi, 2000;Maruta, Colligan, Malinchoc, & Offord, 2000;Peterson, Seligman, Yurko, Martin, &.…”

“…Healthcare professionals have increasingly realised that individual differences in affect and personality have significant predictive value on subjective and objective health status, and on health-promoting behaviours (Artistico et al, 2000). However, little research in this area has been conducted among samples of older women, which may be particularly important as it might be expected that the effects of optimism may be diminished by limited functional abilities, and limited future expectations (Artistico et al, 2000).…”