Angelina Sutin, assistant professor in the department of behavioral sciences and social medicine, has received a $2.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

Our personality predicts more than just the type of friends we may have. It also provides significant clues about our health and can even predict how long we might live.

Yet little is known about how our personality forms relative to what we know about its consequences on health across the lifespan.

Florida State University College of Medicine Assistant Professor Angelina Sutin is seeking answers with the help of a $2.8 million National Institutes of Health grant.

As part of a five-year study, her team will work to identify prenatal and childhood neighborhood risk factors contributing to the development of personality traits most consequential for healthy aging. A better understanding of these relationships is the first step toward earlier interventions for improving health outcomes.

A number of biological, social and behavioral influences affect pregnancy. Did the mother smoke, drink, use drugs, suffer from depression or experience physical or mental abuse?

In childhood, similar influences vary from child to child depending on where they lived and the relative socioeconomic factors in play.

The broader goal is to understand where personality comes from in childhood to have a better sense of how we could intervene, Sutin said. One thing we are looking at, for example, is what factors might be involved in helping some kids to be more resilient than others.

Sutin plans to integrate three established frameworks of health research addressing those factors into one theoretical model examining the influences on formation of personality and the eventual health consequences. She will be assisted by FSU College of Medicine faculty researchers from the departments of behavioral sciences and social medicine, biomedical sciences and geriatrics.

The research centers on three longtime behavioral and biological health studies conducted in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia. The studies, involving thousands of participants assessed over a span of several decades, look at risk factors ranging from prenatal health to childhood place of residence.

The U.S. study will allow Sutin to look more closely at relative neighborhood safety, family income and education and potential links with health outcomes.

Even though the participants in these studies are from three completely different cultural contexts, if you grow up in vulnerable circumstances, regardless of where it is, its still vulnerable circumstances, Sutin said. Were going to be able to look at that in early childhood with the Australian and the English data, young adulthood in the English data and middle adulthood into old age with the U.S. data.

Leslie Beitsch, chair of the department of behavioral sciences and social medicine, said Sutin is renowned for her exceptional research.

Dr. Sutins work is often cited in the lay press but is even more influential within health psychology academic circles, and its easy to understand why, Beitsch said. Projects like this offer the potential to unlock new therapeutic pathways that enable people to experience more optimal health across the life course.

Sutin, College of Medicine Associate Professor of Geriatrics Antonio Terracciano and others have published research showing that those who show more conscientiousness generally experience better health outcomes and greater longevity. Neuroticism leads in the other direction.

Managing health behaviors associated with conscientiousness and neuroticism, then, could be an effective intervention to address health problems.

In the ongoing study, Sutin hopes to gain understanding about how these traits emerge, potentially leading to new ways of mitigating unwanted behaviors linked to personality.

This project really began with thinking about where personality traits come from, she said. It makes more sense to intervene at the source rather than later in life.

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FSU researchers receive $2.8 million grant to search for the origin of personality traits impacting longevity - Florida State News