ABSTRACT
Much as perceptions, diagnoses, and treatments of disease are influenced by the society and culture in which they occur (Payer, 1988), the personality-to-health links we observe are strongly influenced by how both personality and health are defined and measured. In terms of health assessment, traditional medical methods identify organic diseases by locating tissue damage, viruses, fungi, and the like, but biopsychosocial methods focus on illness as opposed to disease, recognizing the importance of various social, cultural, and individual factors that influence symptom perception, seeking of treatment, and entrance into the sick role. Analogously, personality assessment techniques typically refer to self-reports of personality, or trait ratings of behavior, but broader assessments may include others’ reports of personality, long-term habits and habit changes, projective tests, interviews, and dynamic judgments of various sorts that allow the researcher to draw deeper conclusions about basic patterns of the individual’s personality, as motivations interact with life situations.
