...For the study, published in the journal Appetite, researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology sent three questionnaires — one on personality, one on eating habits, and one on food choices — to a random sample of addresses. After excluding subjects who skipped more than 10 percent of the questions, data from nearly a thousand participants (with an average age of 55 years old) was analyzed.
The personality questions were designed to measure what psychologists believe are the five basic dimensions of personality — openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The researchers were curious whether, and to what extent, high or low scores on these different traits would correlate with certain eating habits.
"We found that a person’s personality does, in fact, determine why he or she eats and what he or she eats,†said Carmen Keller, the study’s lead author. For one thing, "A lack of conscientiousness leads people to eat impulsively and to lose self-control in the face of tempting food situations with palatable and nicely smelling and tasting food," she explained. In addition, "Neurotic people may eat too much high-caloric food to deal with their negative emotions." Extroversion, which, unlike neuroticism or a lack of conscientiousness tends to have mostly positive connotations in society, was also linked to potentially unhealthy eating habits...
