There is little doubt that the Five-Factor Model (FFM) of personality traits (the “Big Five”) is currently the dominant paradigm in personality research and one of the most influential models in all of psychology. Digman’s 1990 review on the topic has become one of the most highly cited articles in the history of the Annual Review of Psychology, with over 8,500 citations. Barrick and Mount’s 1991 meta-analysis of job performance and the FFM – itself cited 11,000 times – brought personality back into the mainstream of Industrial/Organizational Psychology. The FFM has led to novel and compelling reformulations of the personality disorders that have influenced DSM-V (Widiger & Trull, 2007). Cross-cultural collaborations have shown the universality of the FFM and demonstrated pervasive fallacies in national character stereotypes (Terracciano et al., 2005). Social Psychologist Harry Reis (personal communication, April 24, 2006) characterized the FFM as “the most scientifically rigorous taxonomy that behavioral science has,” and for his research on the FFM, Paul Costa was selected by the Division of General Psychology of the American Psychological Association to present the 2004 Arthur W. Staats Lecture for Contributions towards Unifying Psychology.

The ways in which personality and health interact are myriad and complex. Does personality predispose us to certain diseases? Does disease lead to changes in personality? The original formulation of psychosomatic medicine sought a direct link between personality and health – anxiety and hypertension, depression and cancer – and was largely unfruitful. Current research seeks to clarify how personality is associated with health-related behaviours like smoking and exercise, which put people at risk for disease. By elucidating the link between personality and health behaviours, the field makes substantive contributions to both patient treatment and public health prevention and intervention programmes aimed at reducing the incidence and prevalence of disease.

Personality as traits

For most of history, scholars and laypersons alike viewed human beings as rational creatures with propensities, abilities and beliefs that guided their conduct. Early in the twentieth century, this view was supplanted by psychoanalysis and behaviourism which characterized personality in radically different ways: for psychoanalysts, the essence of the person was in unconscious and often irrational processes; for behaviourists, the person was no more than a collection of learned responses to environmental reinforcements. Contemporary research has in turn rejected these two extreme views of personality and returned to a more commonsense approach, in which familiar traits such as persistence and sociability are seen as important determinants of behaviour.

It does not follow, however, that personality psychology is nothing but common sense.

Students of stress, illness, and adaptation have taken a particular interest in bereavement, and with good reason. Death of a spouse is consistently rated as the most stressful of normative events (Holmes & Rahe, 1967), requiring the maximal readjustment in life; it is also a common experience, which nearly half the population will eventually face. The intensity and frequency of this stressor make it of undeniable social importance. At the same time, there are powerful methodological advantages to the study of bereavement for an understanding of stress, coping, and adaptational processes. Because death of spouse is an objectively verifiable event generally beyond the control of the widowed individual, artifacts that plague the study of stress and illness (Schroeder & Costa, 1984) can be minimized.

The results of bereavement studies provide mixed support for the view that life stress causes subsequent mental and physical illness and mortality. Some studies show excess mortality, particularly for males, in the year or two following bereavement (Helsing, Szklo, & Comstock, 1981; Parkes, Benjamin, & Fitzgerald, 1969), but there are methodological difficulties with most studies of mortality (M. Stroebe, Stroebe, Gergen, & Gergen, 1981; Susser, 1981). Studies of health after bereavement are also complicated by the problems of disentangling subjective health perceptions from objective disease processes (Costa & McCrae, 1985a), and one of the few studies to use as control variables baseline measures taken before the loss event concluded that, “using a variety of health indicators, the effects of these [bereavement] events were either nonexistent or slight and brief.