Tervisepsühholoogia

Eesti Arst 2012; 91(2):10

Trait models going forward

Broad personality domain models such as the Big Five and HEXACO have been a good value and will remain useful for many purposes. Understanding their overlaps and differences will benefit from a usefully comprehensive pool of narrower traits, for the domains are nothing more but these narrower traits assembled in different ways. Besides helping the broad domains, such a pool will allow us to study personality development and links with life outcomes with greater accuracy

A bottom-up approach dramatically increases the predictability of body mass from personality traits

Personality traits consistently relate to and allow predicting body mass index (BMI), but these associations may not be adequately captured with existing inventories’ domains or facets. Here, we aimed to test the limits of how accurately BMI can be predicted from and described with personality traits. We used three large datasets (combined N ≈ 100,000) with nearly 700 personality assessment items to (a) empirically identify clusters of personality traits linked to BMI and (b) identify relatively small sets of items that predict BMI as accurately as possible. Factor analysis revealed 14 trait clusters showing well-established personality trait–BMI associations (disorganization, anger) and lesser-known or novel ones (altruism, obedience). Most of items’ predictive accuracy (up to r = .24 here but plausibly much higher) was captured by relatively few items. Brief scales that predict BMI have potential clinical applications—for instance, screening for risk of excessive weight gain or related complications