Personality plays a part in weight gain

Weighty issue ... personality traits may predict our tendency to put on weight.

Are you impulsive? Conscientious? Extraverted? Neurotic? If so, you may now be able to predict where your weight is going, according to a study examining 50 years of data, which has been published by the American Psychological Association.
Researchers from America's National Institute on Ageing looked at data from a longitudinal study of 1988 people to determine how personality traits are associated with weight and body mass index. Their conclusions were published online in the APA's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Weight tends to increase with age, but impulsivity was the strongest predictor of who would be overweight, the team found, commenting that, "to maintain a healthy weight, it is typically necessary to have a healthy diet and a sustained program of physical activity, both of which require commitment and restraint. Such control may be difficult for highly impulsive individuals." They also noted that impulsive people were more likely than most to overeat and binge-drink.

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The study found that those who rated most highly on impulsivity measures weighed 10 kilograms more, on average, than those who were the least impulsive.
However, "low agreeableness" was also linked to a greater-than-average increase in BMI - especially among those who were cynical, competitive or aggressive. Neurotic types were more likely to go through cycles of weight loss and weight gain throughout their lives. Conscientiousness tended to be associated with steady weight and a leaner physique, while extroversion tended to predict a higher BMI.
"To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to examine whether personality is associated with fluctuations in weight over time," the researchers note. "Interestingly, our pattern of associations fits nicely with the characteristics of these traits." They did not find any correlation between weight and changes in personality over time.
The study's participants were drawn from the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Ageing, the NIA's ongoing multidisciplinary study of normal ageing. The group included equal numbers of men and women; 71 per cent of participants were white, 22 per cent black, and 7 per cent of other ethnicities. Weighed and measured over a period of 50 years, 14,521 assessments were made in all; in addition, each subject was assessed on openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism - as well as on 30 sub-categories of these personality traits.
"The pathway from personality traits to weight gain is complex and probably includes physiological mechanisms, in addition to behavioural ones," Dr Angelina Sutin, who led the study, said. "We hope that by more clearly identifying the association between personality and obesity, more tailored treatments will be developed. For example, lifestyle and exercise interventions that are done in a group setting may be more effective for extroverts than for introverts."
smh.com.au


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