Personality profiles and minor affective psychopathology in a non-clinical sample: an empirical verification of Cloninger's theoretical model.

Background: Psychopathological vulnerability may be related to certain personality traits. The aim of this study was to explore the association of minor affective psychopathology and the regular use of psychotropic medication with temperament and character profiles from Cloninger's personality model, in a sample of active professional people.

Methods: This cross-sectional study included 498 non-clinical subjects, teachers in a local school system.

Personality traits associated with caffeine intake and smoking.

Objectives: Some studies find a relationship between certain personality traits, as impulsivity or sensation seeking, and caffeine consumption, but these studies do not consider the potential confounding effect of smoking on caffeine intake, a co-occurrence that has been well demonstrated in epidemiological and clinical studies. The main objective of this cross-sectional study was to analyze the association of personality with caffeine intake controlling for the effects of smoking; a secondary objective was to explore the effect of caffeine intake on the previously known relationship between personality and smoking.

Methods: A sample of 498 adults answered a self-questionnaire including socio-demographic variables, and items regarding consumption of tobacco and caffeine.

Factors associated with psychiatric morbidity in Spanish schoolteachers.

Background: The relationship between psychiatric morbidity and characteristics of the work environment has been well-documented, and one of the professional groups in which psychiatric symptoms are most common is schoolteachers.

Aims: The present study was designed to evaluate the association between psychiatric morbidity [measured with General Health Questionnaire (GHQ)-28 score] and workplace-, sociodemographic- and personality-related variables in schoolteachers.

Methods: A sample of 498 non-university teachers in the city of Granada (southern Spain) were studied with a questionnaire comprising items that covered work-related variables (work and professional variables, as well as job perceptions), sociodemographic characteristics of the teachers and personality, evaluated with the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI-125).

Comparison between two quasi-induced exposure methods for studying risk factors for road crashes.

This study was designed to compare estimates from two quasi-induced exposure methods of the effects of driver- and vehicle-related conditions on the risk of causing a road crash for drivers of vehicles with four or more wheels. From the Spanish register of road crashes with victims, the authors selected, for 1993-2002, all 755,329 drivers of >or=4-wheeled vehicles involved in single-vehicle crashes or in two-vehicle collisions in which only one of the drivers was considered responsible. Multinomial and logistic regression models were used to obtain the odds ratio for each driver- and vehicle-related variable.

Does vehicle color influence the risk of being passively involved in a collision?

Background: Bright- or light-colored vehicles are sometimes regarded as safer because they are presumably more visible. We examined the effect of vehicle color on the risk of being passively involved in a collision.

Methods: This paired case-control study used data from the Spanish database of traffic crashes.