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Past and current emotions and attitudes: How survivors of cancer and heart disease adjusted to their illness
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that survivors of cancer and especially those who survived beyond medical expectations are more likely to have had a cancer-prone personality before diagnosis that changed in a positive direction some time after diagnosis than heart disease survivors. Three groups of survivors: (1) heart-disease survivors (N = 31), (2) cancer survivors with non-exceptional recoveries (N = 35), and (3) cancer survivors who survived despite less than a 25% expectancy that they would (N = 19) were compared. As hypothesized, both cancer groups exhibited significantly more cancer-prone characteristics before diagnosis than the heart disease group. They converged to a similar point at the present time. There was a tendency for the exceptional survivor group to exhibit more of the cancer-prone characteristics before diagnosis than the other cancer group. When a subsample of exceptional survivors who survived despite a less than 1% expectancy of survival was examined, they exhibited a significantly greater change in personality from before diagnosis to the present time than the remaining cancer groups and the heart disease group. Similar patterns were found on the two subscales of Depression and Anger, suggesting their importance in the Cancer-prone Personality. Demographics and gender were partialled out of the analyses. A path analysis implicating parental relationships in predicting cancer-prone personality and cancer-prone personality in predicting cancer was discussed.
Subject Area
Personality psychology
Recommended Citation
Katz, Lori Susan, "Past and current emotions and attitudes: How survivors of cancer and heart disease adjusted to their illness" (1992). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9305847.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9305847