Type E Personality: 10 Steps to Emotional Excellence in Love, Work and Life

by Reford, Virginia Williams

Groundbreaking evidence that not only shows a proven link between our emotional styles and our physical well-being but shows that we can adjust our personalities to enjoy better health and success in life.

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 17, 2004

Reviews

[Douglas Lord · Rating 1 out of 5]

Previously, Redford Williams (director, behavioral research, Duke Univ. Medical Ctr.) has researched the health risks of the Type A personality. Here, he and historian Virginia Williams put forth a new personality, Type E (as in “Emotional Excellence”), and show how readers can adopt its ten healthful traits (e.g., good cheer, long lives, and happy relationships). Their techniques–including tuning into, recording, and reviewing one’s feelings–however, seem much like cognitive behavioral therapy and hardly merit the authors’ smug, self-congratulatory tone. Attempts to replicate the sunny mood of books like Martin Seligman’s Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment point out multiple flaws. References to scientific studies clog the text and decrease readability; patient success stories, while expressive, are overemotional; and the brief self-survey is simplistic. Public libraries might instead acquire the authors’ earlier Lifeskills: 8 Simple Ways to Build Stronger Relationships, Communicate More Clearly, and Improve Your Health or Albert Ellis’s How to Make Yourself Happy and Remarkably Less Disturbable.

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