Type d Personality and Disease: is Stress – Reactivity the Possible Mechanism? Present Situation and Future Directions

Abstract

Type D (the distressed) personality is associated with various noncommunicable diseases, their outcomes. Distressed personality is related with both physical as well as mental health (Molls, Denollet, 2010). Despite that the association between type D personality and cardiovascular diseases and their outcomes has been confirmed by scientific evidence (Denollet, 2005; Martens et al, 2010), the mechanisms accounting for these associations is still unrevealed (Kupper et al., 2013). One of the possible mechanism – Type D personality and stress reactivity (Habra, Linden, Anderson, Weinberg, 2003; Molloy et al., 2008). The objective was to review literature concerning Type D (distressed) personality disease-promoting mechanism - stress reactivity. The controversial results of the systematic literature review confirmes stress - reactivity of the Type D personality being one of possible mechanism revealing association between Type D personality and diseasest. Better understanding of possible mechanism is an important impact for the prevention and intervention, especially, talking about cardiovascular diseases.Implications for the future research are discussed.