Psychosomatic Medicine 13:304-313 (1951)
© 1951 American Psychosomatic Society

Personality and Heart Disease

¹ Neuropsychiatric Service, Birmingham Veterans' Administration General Hospital, Van Nuys, California

This study constitutes an objective and quantitative test of some of Dunbar's hypotheses concerning personality patterns in hypertensive cardiovascular disease, rheumatic heart disease, and coronary occlusion. Two groups were added from hospitalized patients, one group with arteriosclerotic heart disease, and a control group consisting of noncardiac infectious diseases. Under the assumption of the null hypothesis, the five groups included in the study are regarded as random samples of the same population.

Data were collected by means of the Guilford and Guilford-Martin series of three inventories, which yielded scores for thirteen personality factors. The subjects were male hospitalized patients from 25 to 65 years of age whose duration of illness was approximately two years and whose period of hospitalization was approximately three months. These criteria limited the actual number of subjects to the following: hypertensive 25, rheumatic 25, coronary occlusion 8, arteriosclerotic 19, and noncardiac 13. The obtained mean scores for each group were submitted to analyses of variance for each of the thirteen personality factors, and the mean factor scores also were converted to C-scores, a technic of scaling which afforded immediate comparison with established norms.

None of the F-ratios from the analyses of variance attained statistical significance at the 5 per cent level of confidence. Only 5 of 65 C-scale scores showed deviations from the middle 54 per cent of the normative sample.

The following conclusions were drawn:

The null hypothesis of the study was supported. No statistically significant differences were obtained and the five groups may be regarded as samples of the same population on these personality factors.

The three experimental and two additional groups show personality factor patterns similar to those of the normative group and their scores, in general, are indicative of good mental health.

Only 5 of 65 scores were found to be suggestive of true differences. Two of these deviations represent agreement with Dunbar; one in designating hypertensive patients as overcritical, and the other in describing the coronary occlusion group as stable in mood. Two represent disagreements with Dunbar, one implying overcriticalness and intolerant attitudes in the rheumatic group, the other indicating a rather cheerful and optimistic trend in the coronary occlusion group. The fifth score deviating from the average showed a motor inertness or disinclination for activity among the arteriosclerotic group.

The hypotheses advanced by Dunbar concerning relationships between personality and cardiac disorder still remained unverified.