وضعیت آسیب پذیری روان رنجوری:گزارش دهی یا شکایت واقعی ؟

Neuroticism is widely documented to reflect an exaggerated reporting of physical symptoms, due to an over-sensitive focus on internal stimuli in individuals high in this trait. This study scrutinized the responses to 409 retrospective health reports to see if negative affect (NA), indicating neuroticism, was differentially related to different types of physical complaints. The role of other personality risk factors, related to neuroticism and coping style were also examined. The findings show that high NA was uniquely related only to diseases of tension type, such as high blood pressure, migraine, or neck pain. Of the other factors, which all correlated with NA, hostility, self-critical attitude, and coping were uniquely related to these same complaints. It is concluded that neuroticism has a more genuine vulnerability potential to disease.

A significant part of personality variation can be ascribed to traits concerning emotional reaction patterns (Claridge & Davis, 2001). One such broad factor is neuroticism reflecting emotional distress, tendency to worry, hypervigilance, and proneness to psychopathology. Findings suggest that neuroticism, also called negative affect, is related to a wide range of dysfunctions and disease such as depression, pain syndromes, eating disorders, psychosomatic complaints, and poor coping (Costa, 1987, Davis, 1997, Kentle, 1989 and O'Brien & DeLongis, 1996). However, it is widely documented that when completing retrospective health-checklists individuals high in neuroticism and negative mood states rate themselves as poorer in health than those low in neuroticism and negative affect ( Fahrenberg, 1992, Feldman et al., 1999 and Watson & Pennebaker, 1989). Consequently, neuroticism is thought to affect an individual's subjective health more than objective health. The present work is an attempt to clarify whether neuroticism can be seen as a more genuine risk factor for physical disease.