Health Behavior Analysis

For many years researchers suspected a connection between the mind and the body, and though it sounds plausible that the mind controls the body or vice versa, researchers instead suggest that a relationship between personality traits and disease exists (Smith & Gallo, 2001). In the health behavior model, proposed by psychologist Timothy W. Smith, personality traits have an effect on changes in health behavior in response to stressful life events (Smith, 2006). The different personality traits studied by Smith and colleagues were organized into five different categories, specifically known as the Five Factor Model (FFM). The FFM (Clark & Schroth, 2010) is a model of personality structures and defines personality under 5 broad categories: Neuroticism,
Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. FFM has been deemed useful in helping personality psychologists identify, which personality characteristics are correlated with an individual’s health (Smith, 2006). Negative emotions and lack of emotional stability (such as anxiety, sadness/depression) are traits represented in the personality of neuroticism. Such traits have been connected with causing poor health amongst individuals. Terracciano et al. conducted a research experiment assessing personality traits and health behaviors and found that emotional stability (low neuroticism) is the most prominent predictor of mortality due to cardiovascular disease (Terracciano et al., 2008).
Undergraduate students are not only seeking a competitive 4-year degree, on the contrary many are on the journey to develop personally.
Such development begins to narrow down personality traits among students and according the Smith’s health behavior model, personality traits can be associated with certain health problems or even triggered by stressful events. In combination with the academic and personal stressors that surround college students, we were interested in collecting data from students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in regards to their personality traits, health behaviors, and possible health outcomes. We wanted to examine the relationship between the following three variables: emotional stability, the number of days students missed class due to illness, and GPA. In accordance with the health behavior model, we hypothesized that students with a low emotional stability personality trait are susceptible to more health problems causing them to miss class due to illness, resulting in a negative correlation between the two variables. We also expect that the higher a student’s emotional stability is, the higher their GPA is likely to be, therefore resulting a positive correlation between the two variables. The more a student has to miss class due to an illness can have an effect on one’s academic performance, so we also hypothesized that a negative correlation is present between the number of days missed due to illness and a student’s reported
GPA. Overall, we expect GPA to mediate the bivariate relationship between emotional stability and days missed due to illness.