Psychologists
Liisa Keltikangas-Järvinen and Kati Heinonen of the
University of Helsinki first studied the children when they were 6, 9
and 12 years old, and again 15 years later, looking for signs of hostility
and its origins.
Type A personalities display extreme ambition, competitiveness, impatience,
and a sense of time pressure.
Taking a family-oriented perspective, which measured how
parents felt about their marriage and their careers, appeared to be just
as important
as the child’s individual risk factors when the researchers were
determining a child’s propensity for hostility, Keltikangas-Jarvinen
says.
Their study appears in the November-December issue of the journal Child
Development.
They found that families of these children fell into three patterns, only
one of which seemed to produce hostile young adults.
The damaging health consequences of hostility are well documented, they
say. It can lead to heart disease, depression and a variety of other mental
and social problems.
Hostility has several components, Keltikangas-Järvinen
says. Hostile people manifest cynicism, mistrust and paranoia about other
people. They
also feel anger and resentment toward others. While hostility is rarely
expressed in physical aggression, verbal insults, argumentativeness and
sarcasm are common.
For this study, the researchers looked at how Type A behavior
in the child’s
household might connect with the emergence of hostility in young adulthood.
They examined the parents’ and children’s Type A behavior,
family socioeconomic status and how satisfied the parents were with their
personal and work lives.
Keltikangas-Järvinen and Heinonen found that the families tended
to fall into three clusters. The first group was average or ordinary families,
without any of the risk factors for hostility, which did not produce hostile
young adults. The Type A families fell into two categories with quite different
results, Keltikangas-Järvinen says. The key was parental life-satisfaction.
The “negative” Type A family cluster linked
low parental life satisfaction and low family socioeconomic status with
high impatience
among the children and high job involvement among the parents. These dissatisfied
Type A parents tended to promote hostility in their children.
On the other hand, “positive” Type A behavior, expressed as
parents’ hard-driving competitiveness and high family socioeconomic
status, coupled with high levels of children’s leadership responsibility,
produced less hostility.
“The role of parental Type A behavior was apparent,” Keltikangas-Järvinen
says, “but parental satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) with life
is of equal importance for understanding how the family environment increases
the likelihood of hostility. We know a good deal about the factors that
predict adult hostility, but prevention is more complicated than identifying
and reducing isolated individual risk factors.”
