Does Personality Affect how People Perceive their Health?

Dusanee Kesavayuth, Robert Rosenman and Vasileios Zikos

No 2013-13, Working Papers from School of Economic Sciences, Washington State University

Abstract: We examine how personality relates to self-reported health satisfaction. With a nation-wide dataset from the United Kingdom, we provide evidence that personality influences how individuals report their satisfaction with their overall health. Using the classification of personality traits according to the Big Five factors, we show that Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and to a lesser extent Openness relate positively to health satisfaction, while Neuroticism relates negatively. Extraversion appears much less closely tied to health satisfaction. Perhaps most interesting, our results provide some evidence that personality traits mitigate the importance of the incidence of illness on health satisfaction.

Keywords: health satisfaction; personality; Big Five factors; illness; subjective well-being (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C25 I10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-hap, nep-hea and nep-neu
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