Relationships between occupant personality and the sick building syndrome explored

Increasing evidence shows that certain personality traits, such as negative affectivity (trait NA), are strongly associated with the reporting of symp toms. The role of personality in sick building syndrome (SBS) symptom repor ting is therefore explored with the aid of a questionnaire completed by occ upants living in apartments with indoor climate problems. A good fit to emp irical data was obtained for a path model in which somatization intervenes between a general psychological factor (predominated by trait NA) and SBS. Occupants with "normal" and "aberrant" NA profiles were classified by clust er analysis and further divided according to frequency of Symptoms. For occ upants with 5 or more SBS symptoms, those with "aberrant" NA profiles have very similar SBS symptom profiles to those with "normal" NA profiles. This indicates that an occupant's trait NA score cannot be used for predicting h is or her SBS symptom profile or frequency of SBS symptoms. An unexpected f inding was that the occupants with "aberrant" NA profiles also perceived fa ctors in the indoor (air) environment as less adverse than the 5 or more sy mptom reporting occupants with "normal" NA profile. Pennebaker and Britting ham's competition of external and internal cues model may explain the resul ts for the occupants with "aberrant" NA profiles, however, our empirical da ta indicate that, unexpectedly, these occupants may not over-report SBS sym ptoms but rather under-report adverse environmental perceptions.