Personality and Exercise

Models of Personality

Two popular frameworks (or taxonomies) dominate the extant research on personality and exercise. The first is Eysenck's three-factor model of traits: extroversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism. Extroversion represents the tendency to be social, assertive, busy, energetic, and positive in affect, while neuroticism represents the tendency to exhibit anxiety, depressed mood, self-consciousness, and vulnerability. Psychoticism, in contrast, represents a tendency toward risk taking, impulsiveness, irresponsibility, manipulativeness, and sensation seeking. The other popular taxonomy is known as the five-factor model of personality and has had considerable support as a basic structure of personality. In addition to the extroversion and neuroticism traits of Eysenck's model, this model includes the traits of agreeableness (e.g., the tendency to be perceptive, creative, reflective, and appreciative of fantasy and aesthetics), openness to experience (e.g., the tendency to be kind, cooperative, altruistic, trustworthy, and generous), and conscientiousness (e.g., the tendency to be ordered, dutiful, self-disciplined, and achievement oriented). These factors are considered orthogonal (i.e., uncorrelated), but extroversion and neuroticism are typically negatively related, while extroversion and conscientiousness are positively related.

Exercise and Personality Relationship

Overall, exercise behavior is positively correlated with extroversion and conscientiousness and negatively related to neuroticism. These are small effects; thus, the associations are reliable perhaps at a population level but contribute to only a small piece of the puzzle when attempting to explain why some people exercise while others do not. Agreeableness, openness to experience, and psychoticism are not related to exercise in a reliable way. The relationships between personality traits and exercise also depend on the mode of activity. The extroversion relationship, for example, appears to be more for vigorous or moderate-intensity exercise but does not hold for light activities or regular leisure-time walking. There is some indication that gender effects (more pronounced for females than for males) and cultural effects (North Americans seem to have a larger extroversion effect than do people from the United Kingdom) may be occurring, but this idea has not undergone enough formal testing at present. There is also some evidence that personality effects may be most influential during regular exercise transitions (e.g., adoption, resumption). Some evidence has demonstrated quite large effects for personality factors of neuroticism, extroversion, and conscientiousness when participants are organized by maintenance, adoption, or cessation exercise patterns. This suggests that personality may have both predisposition and acquisition effects on behavior change and regulation.

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