Type A Personality

1959

Meyer Friedman (1910–2001), Ray Rosenman (1921–2013)

In 1959, two cardiologists reported their observation that many of their male patients exhibited similar behaviors: while at the doctors’ offices, the men were impatient, time conscious, anxious, driven to achieve, and very focused on work—typical, one might think, of the corporate culture of the day. What alerted Rosenman and Friedman to pay attention to these men’s behaviors was that they had to frequently replace their medical-office furniture due to the damage these men inflicted on it. The cardiologists followed the progress of these men in regard to coronary heart disease (CHD) and began to suspect that behavioral and psychological factors were linked to the men’s heart problems. The pattern was labeled the type A behavior pattern, and by the early 1970s the construct began to be widely investigated.

This discovery occurred at a time when new attention was being paid to lifestyle and health in American culture. By the 1960s the primary causes of mortality and disability were CHD, cancer, stroke, and accidents; these diseases were costly in both personal and public ways. Health research was beginning to show that many diseases had important behavioral and psychological components. If unhealthy behaviors could be changed and personality modified, then the nation would benefit. CHD was paradigmatic for the shift to a more holistic view of health and the need for psychological expertise in research and treatment. Type A behaviors caught the public’s imagination as a way to think about the relationship between mind and health.

Research initially indicated a link between heart disease and the type A behaviors of time urgency, excessive need to achieve, and anxious hostility. Further research narrowed the behavioral and psychological factors down to just hostility, which is manageable through psychotherapy, thus offering another role for psychologists in the treatment of CHD.

SEE ALSO Stress (1950), Biopsychosocial Model of Health (1977), Mind-Body Medicine (1993)

A constant sense of time urgency is one of the key characteristics of Type A personality.