When the Type A personality research was revealed to be based on fraudulent research, its retraction caused shock waves to reverberate throughout the behavioral medicine community. After all, doesn’t it make sense that people whose personality leads them to be hard-driving, competitive, and impatient would be heart attacks just waiting to happen? Although they may not be pleasant to be with, these people formerly known as Type A don’t seem to be any worse off than their counterparts, the so-called Type B. What’s more, the Type C personality also proposed by behavioral health researchers is based on just as flawed a set of studies.

The tendency to type people by letters ended in the alphabet with Type D, which remains the only personality style standing amidst all the retractions and controversy. According to a new systematic review of the literature, it still appears to hold up.

The “D” in Type D stands for “distressed.” Baylor University’s Adam O’Riordan and colleagues (2023), who conducted the review, further define people with Type D as exhibiting the two components of negative affectivity, or sadness and anxiety, and social inhibition, the tendency to push aside the emotions they feel when they’re with other people.

Type D was originally identified in cardiac patients, and in prior reviews of the literature, stood up to scientific scrutiny. Cardiac patients with this personality, in at least a majority of studies conducted, had twice the risk of dying, and as a result, European Guidelines for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention, as cited by O’Riordan et al., include Type D as a “psychosocial risk factor to be assessed in clinical practice.”

People with Type D personalities, prior researchers find,........

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