Type A-B Behavior and Self-Estimates of the Frequency of Headaches in College Students

Individuals who suffer from migraine headaches have been characterized as tense, hard-driving individuals who have difficulty in coping with stress ( 3 ) . These behaviors are similar to those which Friedman and Rosenman (1) used to describe the behavior of the Type A person. This similarity suggested to us that Type A college students might experience headaches more frequently than Type B students. To test this hypothesis, we asked 177 college students to respond to the Glass ( 2 ) version of the Jenkins Activity Survey for college students and to estimate the frequency with which they experienced tension or migraine headaches on a three-point scale, i.e., often, sometimes, never. The Jenkins Survey was scored using the system developed by Glass and, like Glass, we define Type A as Jenkins' score 8 and Type B as Jenkins' score < 8. Using the data in a contingency table, we found chat the relationship between Type A/B behavior and the frequency of headaches was significant, i.e., x2 = 9.26, p < .01, with 4 = .23.