性格测试也可成为医疗手段

Are you open to new experiences? Are you a risk taker? Do you like parties?

你乐于体验新鲜事物吗？你愿意冒险吗？你喜欢派对吗？

Odds are, questions like these were not part of your last doctor’s appointment. But one day they might be — a growing body of research suggests that your personality can influence your health. And some experts think changing people’s personal traits might one day help treat diseases — or keep people from getting them in the first place.
这类问题不大可能出自你刚看过的医生之口。但有朝一日医生也许真会这么问——越来越多的研究表明，你的个性会影响你的健康。一些专家认为，在未来的某一天，改变人的性格特征或许会有助于治疗疾病——或者把病痛扼杀在摇篮之中。

The research also comes at a time when many are calling for a more individualized approach to medicine. Some day, researchers hope, personality testing could be used to help your doctor design treatment specifically to you.
相关研究工作取得进展之际，许多人正在呼吁医生以更有针对性的方法来给病人开药。研究者们希望，个性测试有一天可以成为你的医生为你专门设计治疗方案的辅助手段。

For a study published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology, Kavita Vedhara and her co-authors gave personality tests to 121 people, and tested their blood to analyze the expression of genes related to inflammation. They found that the personality trait of extroversion was associated with increased expression of genes promoting inflammation. Meanwhile, conscientiousness, which the authors define as a trait “reflecting planfulness, caution, and harm avoidance,” was associated with decreased expression of pro-inflammatory genes. Since inflammation can be part of the body’s response to infection, higher expression of pro-inflammatory genes can mean a more active immune system; lower expression can mean a relatively less active one.
《神经心理内分泌学》(Psychoneuroendocrinology)杂志发表了卡维塔·韦德哈拉(Kavita Vedhara)等人基于其研究写就的一篇论文。他们对121个人进行了性格测试；还为其做了血液检测，以分析与炎症反应有关的基因表达。他们发现，外向型的性格特征是与更高的促炎基因表达水平联系在一起的。与此同时，勤勉审慎型人格——按照作者们的义中，这种性格的主要特点在于计划性强、谨小慎微、能够避免受到伤害——则是和较低的促炎基因表达水平联系在一起的。既然炎症可以被看作人体对感染的反应，那么促炎基因表达水平较高可能意味着免疫系统更加活跃，促炎基因表达水平较低则意味着免疫系统不那么活跃。

It could be, the authors write, that people with weak immune systems become more introverted to protect themselves from infection (meet fewer people, get fewer germs). They might become more conscientious for the same reason. On the other hand, it’s possible that people’s personalities affect their gene expression — people who go to a lot of fun, germy parties (or who are really bad at washing their hands) might start to undergo gene-expression changes that strengthen their immune systems.
这篇论文的作者在文中写道，为了避免感染，免疫系统比较脆弱的人可能会变得更内向（少见人，少接触细菌）。出于同样的原因，他们或许也会变得更谨慎。反过来说，人们的个性也有可能在影响他们的基因表达——经常参加有趣但却在散播细菌的派对的人（或者不会好好洗手的人）或许会在基因表达方面有所变化，而这种变化能强化他们的免疫系统。

This doesn’t mean everybody should get a personality test, Dr. Vedhara told Op-Talk. But it does suggest that in general, a treatment approach that considers the patient’s psychological profile may be more effective than one that just looks at physical symptoms.
韦德哈拉博士告诉本报Op-Talk栏目，这并不意味着每个人都该做性格测试。但由此的确可以看出，在通常情况下，把患者的心理状况考虑在内的治疗方案，可能会比只着眼于生理症状的治疗方案有效得多。

“If you’re confronted with a chronic condition” like diabetes or heart disease, she explained, “you may well have underlying beliefs about your condition which influence how likely you are to engage with treatment, you might have an emotional response to that condition which might influence your underlying physiology and your ability to recover or to manage your disease, you may well have an orientation which makes you more or less likely to exercise” — and looking at all of those factors as well as the physical manifestations of the condition itself might help doctors treat it better.
她解释说，“如果得了慢性病”，比如糖尿病或者心脏病，“你很可能对自己的疾病有着潜在的看法，这些看法或许会影响你对治疗的投入程度；你可能因为生病而产生情绪上的反应，这种反应或许会影响你的潜在心理、康复能力以及控制疾病的能力；你很可能具有某种倾向性，这种倾向性会影响你锻炼身体的意愿”——把所有这些因素以及疾病本身的生理表现都纳入考量，或许有助于医生更好地治疗你的病痛。

“Most areas of medical intervention work quite well,” she said, “but I think that we’re on the brink of seeing a future where we use psychological interventions and behavioral interventions to maximize their efficacy.”
“医疗干预在大多数情况下都很管用，”她说，“但我认为，我们即将看到利用心理干预和行为干预来实现医疗干预效用最大化的未来。”

Joshua Jackson, a psychology professor at Washington University, also sees understanding personality as a way to improve physical health. In a recent study, he and his co-authors looked at personality and longevity — or, more specifically, at how your friends’ assessments of your personality might predict how long you’ll live. They found that men whose friends thought they were conscientious and open tended to live longer than those whose friends found them less so; for women, the traits associated with longer life were agreeableness and emotional stability. And friends’ assessments of subjects’ personalities were better than their own self-reports at predicting how long they would live.
华盛顿大学(Washington University)的心理学教授约书亚·杰克逊(Joshua Jackson)也认为，理解个性是改善身体健康状况的一条途径。在最近的研究中，他和合著者调查了个性和寿命之间的关系——或者更确切地说，是用你朋友对你个性的评估，来预测你的寿命。他们发现，那些被朋友评价为谨慎、心态开放的男性，往往比没有得到这种评价的男性寿命长；而对于女性来说，被评价为随和、情绪稳定的人往往有更长的寿命。在预测受试者的寿命方面，朋友对受试者的个性评估，往往比受试者的自我评估的更准确。