Personality factors in personality development

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How gregarious you are, whether you tend to be anxious all the time and how responsible you are for your own actions certainly depend on a myriad of factors. Genetics, your home and school environment during childhood, as well as early life experiences, all contribute to the type of person you become.

But in a study published in Archives of Disease in Childhood (Fetal & Neonatal Edition), scientists in the UK report that there may be another more surprising contributor to your personality traits—whether you were born prematurely.

The researchers studied a group of 200 people who were either born when they were less than 32 weeks old or with very low birth weight, both of which have been linked to other health issues in previous studies. These 200 people were compared on personality traits to 197 others born to term and of normal birth weight when all of the people in the study were 26 years old. The group of people born early or of low birth weight were more likely than the controls to fit into what the authors call a socially withdrawn personality; these people scored higher on traits of introversion, neuroticism and autistic features, while scoring lower on risk taking and agreeableness.