Abstract
Obesity is a widespread and broadly consequential health condition associated with numerous medical complications that could increase mortality rates. As personality concerned individual’s patterns of feeling, behavior, and thinking, it may help in understanding how people with obesity differ from people with normal-weight status in their typical weight-relevant behavior. So far, studies about personality and BMI associations have mainly focused on broad personality traits. The main purpose of this study was to explore the personality and health associations among a clinical group composed of 46 outpatients with overweight/obesity (mean age = 55.83; SD = 12.84) in comparison to a healthy control group that included 46 subjects (mean age = 54.96; SD = 12.60). Both the clinical and control groups were composed of 14 males and 32 females. Several personality and psychopathological aspects were assessed with the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI). The results of the analysis of variance of aligned rank transformed (ART) showed that patients with overweight/obesity reported higher scores for Somatic Complaints, Depression, and Borderline Features than the control group. Logistic regression highlighted specifically that the subscales of the Borderline Features assessing the Negative Relationship contributed to the increased risk of belonging to the clinical group. For the purpose of this study, the role of gender was considered. The present findings highlight the importance of focusing on assessing personality functioning in the health context and on specific characteristics of interpersonal relationships to promote more tailored treatments.
Highlights
The association between personality and health issues has been widely detected showing a cooccurrence between certain personality characteristics and an increased risk for chronic diseases and mortality
The measures were included within the assessment phase required from the Center; for the control group, subjects were asked to participate in the study by asking them to accept to be measured for weight and height and to fill out questionnaires
The main aim of the current study was to investigate if specific personality and psychopathological dimensions assessed by the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) were associated with overweight and obesity
Summary
The association between personality and health issues has been widely detected showing a cooccurrence between certain personality characteristics and an increased risk for chronic diseases and mortality. Some personality characteristics seem to increase risk for negative health outcomes and worse prognoses during disease course (i.e., Powers and Oltmanns, 2012; Wimmelmann et al, 2018). Obesity is the result of complex interactions between genetics and environmental and psychological factors (Sutin et al, 2011). Several aspects of psychological functioning, like depressive symptoms, anxiety, and its related somatic manifestations, are involved in body mass index (BMI) and weight gain (Luppino et al, 2010; Pazzagli et al, 2013; Tambelli et al, 2017)
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