Article archive / October 2019
Originally published: . Volume 10, No. 10. Source pages: 10.
Psychology Gumbo
Does Personality Play a Role in Cancer?
[Editor's Note: This column comes from a previous issue. Dr. Brannon is an invited speaker this at the state psychology session,to be held Nov. 1, Advances in Health Psychology.]
Even after thirty years you never forget meeting Hans Eysenck. Except for a slightly impish look to him, as if he thought everything was just a bit amusing, the great Eysenck seemed fairly normal. He should have had ray beams shooting from his forehead. Hans Eysenck was the most cited psychologist of his lifetime, one of the most prolific, and definitely one of the most courageous.
Dr. Eysenck had been coaxed by LSU’s Ralph Dreger to come to New Orleans to present at Louisiana Psychological Association. We were all at the first evening reception, cruising down the lovely Mississippi on a riverboat which was delightful. The next day Eysenck would speak about a fascinating topic, death. He shared his research on predicting who died of what disease, and it was something to remember in and of itself.
Because of Eysenck’s visit to the Big Easy, I’ve always taken note when this type of research comes up, like the recent Purdue study on cancer and child abuse. But a recent article on Medscape, “No Such Thing as a Cancer-Prone Personality, Study Shows,” left a lot to be desired in methods. And, the lack of results included even those to known risk factors, and we all know what that means.
So I asked Dr. Linda Brannon, McNeese professor, health psychology expert, and author, to take a look for us.
Comment: Dr. Linda Brannon, McNeese Professor, Health Psychology
Students have consulted me many times concerning research projects they were planning, and many of these students have some research topic involving personality traits or factors. That situation shouldn’t be surprising—these students are, after all, psychology students. Psychologists are interested in personality.
What has surprised me over the years is how rarely research has confirmed the value of personality factors in understanding or predicting behavior. So, it comes as less of a surprise to me than to many psychologists that little evidence exists for personality as a factor in developing cancer.
Indeed, the widely publicized Type A Behavior Patters is 1) not a personality type and 2) not a very good predictor of cardiovascular disease. The Type A Behavior Pattern, originated by cardiologists Friedman and Rosenman in the 1970s, was really a combination of factors, some of which related to personality (such as hostility and impatience) and some of which did not (feelings of time pressure and concern with acquiring money). That concept gained a lot of publicity as a result of a large-scale study on middle-aged, at-risk men, but further research on more diverse populations has led to less enthusiasm for this concept.
The Cancer Prone Personality concept has less supporting evidence and has generated more controversy. Most studies find no link or only a very weak association between any type of psychosocial factors and the development or progression of cancer. In studies that reviewed and evaluated the size of effects for many other studies (Garssen, 2004; Petticrew, Bell, & Hunter, 2002), the conclusions were that the evidence is weak. The best of these weak predictors involve unhealthy emotional expression, most often the tendency to deny or repress emotion.
In an interesting contrast, psychologist Hans Eysenck and his colleague Ronald Grossarth-Maticek published a series of articles during the 1990s that showed a strong link between personality and the development of cancer (Eysenck, 1990, 1993; Grossarth-Maticek & Eysenck, 1990; Grossarth-Maticke et al., 1990). They described their findings in terms of a cancer- prone personality, which prominently featured the concept of difficulty in dealing with emotion. Those studies seemed, as some other researcher put it, too good to be true, and these critics accused Eysenck of scientific fraud. Eysenck and his colleagues (Grossarth- Maticek, Eysenck & Barrett, 1993), of course, defended themselves vigorously, claiming that the studies that failed to replicate his results didn’t administer the personality tests properly.
The controversy continues, with an interesting split: Reseachers in the United States tend to find little evidence that psychosocial factors play much of a role in cancer development or progression, but researchers in other part of the world find stronger evidence. For example, the Eysenck and Grossarth-Maticek research was conducted in Europe. In addition, an Australian author (Benjamin, 2010) argued recently that psychotherapy interventions compare favorably with radiation and chemotherapy as treatments for cancer.
So, where does all that controversy leave the concept of personality factors in cancer? I think it leaves psychologists in the United States seeming like quacks if we argue that personality plays a role in cancer; we have no support from research credible to U.S. medical experts to back up those claims. What is the real role of personality in cancer? We just don’t know.
Linda Brannon, PhD, licensed psychologist and professor in the Department of Psychology at McNeese State University in Lake Charles is co-author of Health Psychology: An Introduction to Behavior and Health, a bestseller in its category on Amazon, and headed to its 10th edition. (Courtesy images)
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