Would this Psychology essay get 12 marks?? PSYA2

Would i get 12 marks for this? I feel like I've written too much, could I get the marks with less information?

Friedman and Roseman identified Type A personality; this is a behavioural style consisting of competitiveness, time urgency and aggressiveness. They are likely to have higher levels of adrenaline, which lead to putting the body into fight or flight. Type B in contrast consists of a personality being relaxed, patient and easy going. F&R investigated into Type A personality and the link with development of heart disease. They carried out a study interviewing American men aged beteen 39-59 to see if they had a type A or B personality. The men were monitored for 8.5 years, their lifestyle and levels of health were assessed throughout. It was found after those 8.5 years, 70% of those that had a heart attack were Type A personality; this implied TAB had an association with having a higher risk of CHD.

The study is longitudinal, strength is it gives a good idea of the long term effect of personality factors on stress related illnesses, and enable the percent of those having a heart attack to be identified. It carries strong ecological validity, as the study and findings can be related to the real word and the set up is a natural experiment, it is found in the real world. However with it being a natural experiment it carries a weakness, it means the variables are uncontrolled which means causality cannot be certain; the cause and effect cannot be established. Further, the population validity lacks, as the participants were all men and aged between 39-59, this restricts the findings being applicable and generalised to others for example females. There is also triangulation as observations and interviews are used to categorise the personalities.

Hardiness is personality type which is less likely to suffer from stress; it is seen as a protective factor. Kobasa found hardiness to be made up of three characteristics, control, commitment and challenge. One of Kobasa’s studies investigated whether this type of personality impacts 800 American business executives were studied using the SRRS, the sample consisted of 150 with a high stress level, some with illness and some with high illness record. The 150 were given a hardiness questionnaire. The findings were the high stress and low illness participants scored highly on the 3 characteristics of hardiness, and the high stress ad high illness scored much lower. This implied the hardiness personality type defends against the negative effects of stress. Through kobasa’s other research it was also found those with this personality to be least vulnerable for illness and implied protection against CHD.

Kobasa’s research relied on self report method, this weakens the evidence as some ps may give false info as effects of social desirability could take place; it gives the research low internal validity. Another weakness is the popn validity, because they were all American ps, which would mean findings could not be generalised to other populations such as different countries. Plus the characteristics, control, commitment and challenge are not operationalised effectively which makes it unclear to which one is the key variable. Further support for Kobasa comes from Lifton’s research that found low hardiness was represented amongst university drop outs, this is support of Kobasa’s study as it proves the finding those with high hardiness are successful in coping with stress, compared to low hardiness levels.

The personality factors have demonstrated their influence on how people respond to stress. Type A has been proved through research to have associations with CHD, where as Hardiness has showed to protect against CHD.