Individual differences in stress: personality types A, B and C and…

The idea

Why the same pressure floors one person and not another. Friedman and Rosenman interviewed around three thousand Californian men and sorted them by manner: Type A competitive, time-urgent and hostile, Type B relaxed and tolerant. Eight and a half years later, of the 257 who had developed coronary heart disease, roughly twice as many were Type A. Later work narrowed it: hostility, not hurry, does the damage. Temoshok's Type C suppresses anger to keep the peace and is linked, far more weakly, to poorer cancer outcomes. Kobasa found executives who stayed well under heavy strain scored high on three Cs: commitment to what they do, seeing change as challenge not threat, and a sense of control. The categories are crude, the samples male, and hardiness may just be tagging optimism.

What earns the marks

• Type A broken into its components, competitiveness, time urgency and hostility, with Type B as the relaxed, tolerant contrast rather than a stress-free person.
• Friedman and Rosenman's prospective design: a large cohort of men classified by structured interview and followed for years, with Type A showing about double the coronary heart disease rate.
• The refinement that hostility is the pathogenic component, so the original package was too broad.
• Type C characterised by emotional suppression, compliance and difficulty expressing anger, associated with poorer cancer prognosis.
• Hardiness with each C explained, not merely listed: commitment as involvement, challenge as construing change as opportunity, control as belief in personal influence over events.
• AO3: the classic samples are male, middle-aged, white-collar and American, so generalisation beyond them is unsafe.
• AO3: types impose categories on continuous traits, and hardiness measured by self-report overlaps with neuroticism and negative affectivity.

Common mistakes and how to put them right

• Listing the three Cs as bare words.

  Put it right: Challenge must be explained as viewing change as an opportunity rather than a threat.

• Saying Type A causes heart disease, when the evidence is a prospective correlation and hostility accounts for most of it.

• Presenting Type C as an established cause of cancer, which the evidence does not support.

• Describing Type B as experiencing no stress, rather than responding to it differently.

• Confusing hardiness with simply being resilient, without naming the three components AQA specifies.

Exam tips

• Scenario questions hand you a character sketch, so quote the detail from the stem that identifies the type before you name it.
• If asked to evaluate hardiness, the narrow sample and the reliance on self-report are the two safest and quickest criticisms.
• Do not open by defining stress. The marks sit on the individual differences, not on background.