Type A behaviour and psychological androgyny among Greek college students

Abstract

Research conducted primarily in the United States suggests that the combination of Type A behaviour, high instrumentality, and low expressiveness may place individuals at relatively high risk for coronary‐artery and heart disease. The present research investigates the trans‐societal generalizability of the structure, reliability, relationships among, and distributional characteristics of these measures for 117 college students in Athens, Greece. As hypothesized, the Greek students were significantly less instrumental and less expressive than the American students, and scored significantly higher on the measure of Type A. Although there were significant mean differences between these samples, the results suggest that many of the interscale relationships are comparable, supporting an etic (universal) interpretation of the findings. Nevertheless, the results suggested several emic (unique) characteristics of these measures and their interrelationships.