Personality, Mental Health, and Your Heart: It's a Puzzle

Key points

Negative emotional traits and mental health problems appear to promote heart disease.

There is growing evidence to support explanations for how and why this happens.

However, the benefits of modifying emotional traits and mental disorders for heart health are unclear.

Nonetheless, the available research has practical value if used to guide a multi-pronged approach.

My recent review of the research on personality , mental health, and heart disease showed that research continues to support and extend knowledge in this area (Contrada, 2025). Yet the idea that emotional personality traits are associated with physical diseases is ancient, going back at least to the time of Hippocrates (Contrada & Goyal, 2004). In the scientific era, this thinking first garnered systematic empi