Already in the first study of Kissen and Eysenck (1962) conducted on a sample of men with lung cancer, it turned out that the occurrence of cancer was related to a low rather than high level of neuroticism. Empirical results, however, did not always confirm this pattern of theoretical relations, and sometimes, they even directly contradicted it. What is particularly often provided in the literature is the graphic presentation of Types C (cancer-prone personality), Type A (coronary heart disease-prone personality), and Type B (normal, not disease-prone personality) in relation to the traits of extraversion and neuroticism, proposed by Eysenck (1991), as shown in Figure 1.Īccording to this perspective, cancer-prone personality (Type C) is associated with neuroticism and introversion, while coronary heart disease-prone personality is associated with neuroticism and extraversion ( Eysenck, 1991). The characteristics of Type C and its relations to other personality types and traits were also the subject of the work of Eysenck (1991). The introduction of Type C into the literature is usually attributed to Greer and Morris (1975), who conducted research on a sample of women with breast cancer and found the co-occurrence of cancer with a certain pattern of behavior associated with abnormal expression of emotions, which they later named Type C behavior ( Greer and Watson, 1985). One of the personality constructs claimed to be associated with the occurrence of cancer is Type C personality ( Eysenck, 1994 Bozo et al., 2014 Habibi et al., 2015), also referred to as Type C behavior ( Greer and Watson, 1985), Pattern C behavior ( Dolińska-Zygmunt, 2001b), or cancer-prone personality ( Eysenck, 1994 Watson et al., 1999). The belief that somatic diseases depend also on psychological factors has been the underlying assumption of many studies that sought to identify those personality characteristics that increased the risk of specific somatic diseases or were responsible for general susceptibility to diseases ( Friedman and Rosenman, 1959 Greer and Morris, 1975 Denollet et al., 1995 Dolińska-Zygmunt, 2001b Ogińska-Bulik and Juczyński, 2008 Horwood et al., 2015 Šmigelskas et al., 2015). Introduction Type C: The Search for Psychological Determinants of Cancer The clinical value of the theoretically refined Type C can be tested in the next step in research on patients with cancer. We have also confirmed the hypothesis concerning the location of the two facets of Type C personality close to each other in the theoretically predicted area between the Delta-Plus/Self-Restraint and Beta-Minus/Passiveness metatraits (in the Circumplex of Personality Metatraits). The measurement model in confirmatory factor analysis with two latent variables proved to be well-fitted to the data. The measure of Type C proved to have acceptable internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha was 0.85 for Submissiveness and 0.78 for Restricted Affectivity). We used (a) our proposed measure of Type C personality and (b) the Circumplex of Personality Metatraits Questionnaire (CPM-Q-SF Strus and Cieciuch, 2017), assessing personality metatraits. The study devoted to the validation of the measure of Type C involved 232 participants aged 18–70 ( M = 29.35, SD = 8.93 54% male). Based on theoretical analyses, taking into account both the literature on Type C and models of personality structure, we have proposed a two-facet structure of Type C, comprising Submissiveness (the interpersonal aspect) and Restricted Affectivity (the intrapersonal aspect). In this paper, we have presented our proposal for reconceptualization and operationalization of Type C (cancer-prone) personality. 2URPP Social Networks University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.1Institute of Psychology, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland.Karolina Rymarczyk 1 *, Anna Turbacz 1, Włodzimierz Strus 1 and Jan Cieciuch 1,2
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