TYPE C PERSONALITY: CHARACTERISTICS, CAUSES AND DISEASES - GEOGRAFÍA - 2025

The type C personality constitutes a set of attitudes and behaviors that usually occur in stressful situations. It is characterized by a patient, passive and peaceful style of interaction, a not very assertive, conformist and extremely cooperative attitude, and finally, by a control of the expression of negative emotions.

An important aspect related to the type C behavior pattern is that of emotional suppression. Emotions influence our lives by playing an important role in our survival, they help us communicate with other people and express what we feel, they warn us when something is wrong and we must change it, they push us to fight for our rights or flee when there is a problem. danger.

They also encourage us to pursue our dreams, to seek our well-being, to be with people who make us feel good, or to seek experiences that comfort us. When these are not expressed and this becomes a habit is when the negative consequences occur.

A curious and important aspect for mental health professionals is that the type C personality pattern is correlated with cancer; that is, people with this personality pattern are more likely to develop cancer.

Characteristics of people with type C personality

The characteristics associated with people with a type C behavior pattern (PCTC) are:

Depression

Research on this variable indicates that it may be an additional factor in the development and appearance of cancer, and it is also known that people with a higher degree of depression have a higher risk of dying from cancer years later.

Helplessness and hopelessness

It is a good predictor of the development of breast cancer and melanomas, as well as of relapses throughout the disease. They are people who react helplessly and helplessly to stressful events.

Lack of social support

It is one of the characteristics that can contribute to the development of cancer. It has been seen that the loss or absence of good relationships with parents can be a predictor of cancer.

There are indications that this characteristic is related to the low activity of NK lymphocytes in the body (cells capable of destroying cancer cells or cells infected by viruses).

Emotional suppression

They are people with great difficulty expressing emotions of anger, aggressiveness and other negative emotions. They tend to keep these emotions to themselves and try to ignore and suppress them, without actually processing them or solving the problem.

However, they express excess positive emotions, such as love, liking, solidarity… They tend to be kind and worry excessively about pleasing.

Causes

The tendency to develop a PCTC comes from the interrelation between genetic factors and the patterns of family interaction that lead a person to learn to react to difficulties, stressful events or trauma, suppressing the manifestation of their needs and feelings.

A kind of vicious circle occurs:

When the person is overwhelmed by the stress that has accumulated over time, they tend to react in different ways.

• On the one hand, he begins to change and develop a more adequate style of coping with stressful events.
• On the other hand, he is overwhelmed and feelings of hopelessness, helplessness and depression appear.
• You can also decide to continue behaving in the same way, increasing your tension more and more. This induces the person to carry out risk behaviors for cancer, such as the consumption of alcohol and tobacco.

Regarding emotional avoidance, this influences the avoidance of situations that produce negative emotions (for example, the person avoids entering into discussions, avoids giving his opinion on conflictive aspects…), as well as not facing conflictive events.

An important aspect is that such avoidance may be related to a lower tendency to detect physical symptoms and therefore to ignore them. Thus, even if a person perceives certain symptoms that they did not present before, they do not go to the doctor, delaying the diagnosis and future treatment of cancer.

Considering the biological aspects related to this, we observe a tendency to emotional avoidance that produces a decrease in the activity of the adreno-medullary sympathetic system, which seems to be associated with a poorer functioning of the NK cells, which would contribute to the beginning, progression or development of cancer.

This style of emotional avoidance may also be masking a depression characterized mainly by the presence of physical symptoms. For example, psychomotor slowing down and fatigue that can be associated with decreased activity of the sympathetic nervous system, making these people at higher risk groups.

Type C behavior pattern and cancer

Already in the year 162, the Greek physician Claudio Galen hypothesized the existence of an increased risk of cancer development in melancholic women. Later, in the early 18th century, Gendron argued that anxious and depressed women were prone to cancer.

In the 1930s of the 19th century, more specific studies began to be developed in the area from the birth of psychosomatic medicine, carried out by Dumbar, Meninger and Alexander. And with the birth of health psychology at the end of the 70s, psychology began to be introduced in a field belonging exclusively to medicine, specifically in the field of oncology.

It is in 1980 when the researchers Morris and Greer raised the existence of a pattern of behavior that they called type C, and whose characteristics are summarized by Eysenck, arguing that these subjects are “highly cooperative, passive, conflict avoidance, emotional suppressors such as anger or anxiety, rigid, using repression as a coping mechanism and with a high predisposition to experience hopelessness and depression.

In 1982, Grossarth-Maticek, Kanazir, Schmidt, and Vetter, H. found that "rational and anti-emotional" behavior was predictive of later development of cancerous disease.

Perhaps one of the most relevant contributions is that made by Temoshok in 1987, who proposes a processual model of coping and cancer style. The focus of attention is on the type of response that people emit to stressful situations or life events. The three individual or combined psychological factors proposed in cancer progression are:

• Type C coping style.
• Emotional expression
• Helplessness and hopelessness.

In short, it could be said that in relation to the problem of the personality prone to cancer, two different types of conceptual approach have been presented.

Relationship with other chronic diseases

As we have seen so far, type C personality was initially proposed as exclusive to patients diagnosed with cancer.

However, over time the susceptibility of these people to chronic diseases such as diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and autoimmune diseases such as lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, lateral sclerosis or asthma has been proposed.

Traue and Pennebaker report the existence of an association between emotional repression and cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, endocrine problems, cancer, pain and asthma…

For their part, Tozzi and Pantaleo find that emotional repression is a common personality characteristic in people who suffer from cancer and other chronic diseases such as diabetes.

Bibliography

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