--- title: Preterm Birth and Preemies Are Linked to Specific Personality Type description: Whether babies are born early can affect the personality traits they develop later, suggests the latest research canonical: https://time.com/3973664/premature-babies-personality/ author: Alice Park article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-07-27T22:30:58.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:58:25.153Z article:section: Health og:title: Premature Babies Are More Likely to Develop This Personality og:description: Whether babies are born early can affect the personality traits they develop later, suggests the latest research og:url: https://time.com/3973664/premature-babies-personality/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf430d7f4c89914cf/69885c9e5f570f2db3b1ca16/gettyimages-rbma_0019.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 3854 og:image:height: 2168 og:image:alt: rbma_0019 og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Premature Babies Are More Likely to Develop This Personality twitter:description: Whether babies are born early can affect the personality traits they develop later, suggests the latest research twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf430d7f4c89914cf/69885c9e5f570f2db3b1ca16/gettyimages-rbma_0019.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Premature Babies Are More Likely to Develop This Personality Type > Sponsored content. 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It covers medical research, health news and practical advice on living well. #### Where can I get reliable health news by email? Health Matters is TIME's weekday health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free weekday newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-health-2026q3/newsletters?i=e3ee9b3a-0e96-41be-a944-a53b24095121&cr=time-nl-health-2026q3-v1) ## Video: The Truth About Egg Freezing [Watch (HLS stream): The Truth About Egg Freezing](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/A1nDxOli.m3u8) (8:41)  _Published 2015-07-16. Vicki Rokhlin, 28, is relying on her 14 frozen eggs to have children. But will they work?_  by [Alice Park](https://time.com/author/alice-park/)  ## Alice Park Senior Correspondent Jul 27, 2015 10:30 PM UTC  small premature baby lies in an incubator a grown hand reaches in grasping the foot in caring manner small premature baby lies in an incubator a grown hand reaches in grasping the foot in caring manner Photodisc—Getty Images  by [Alice Park](https://time.com/author/alice-park/)  ## Alice Park Senior Correspondent Jul 27, 2015 10:30 PM UTC How gregarious you are, whether you tend to be anxious all the time and how responsible you are for your own actions certainly depend on a myriad of factors. Genetics, your home and school environment during childhood, as well as early life experiences, all contribute to the type of person you become. But in a [study published in _Archives of Disease in Childhood (Fetal & Neonatal Edition)_](http://fn.bmj.com/lookup/doi/10.1136/archdischild-2014-308007), scientists in the UK report that there may be another more surprising contributor to your personality traits—whether you were born prematurely. The researchers studied a group of 200 people who were either born when they were less than 32 weeks old or with very low birth weight, both of which [have been linked to other health issues](http://time.com/3705755/premature-babies-developmental-risks/) in previous studies. These 200 people were compared on personality traits to 197 others born to term and of normal birth weight when all of the people in the study were 26 years old. The group of people born early or of low birth weight were more likely than the controls to fit into what the authors call a socially withdrawn personality; these people scored higher on traits of introversion, neuroticism and autistic features, while scoring lower on risk taking and agreeableness. **MORE:** [Some Premature Babies Can Survive After Only 22 Weeks, Study Says](http://time.com/3850097/premature-babies-survival/) All told, premature birth accounted for about 11% of the personality assessment, the researchers say. That’s just a fraction of the different experiences that make up personality, but it’s possible that early birth can set children up for certain traits for a number of different reasons. Biologically, it’s possible that the premature birth exposes infants to a potentially traumatic environment in a neonatal intensive care unit that’s very different from the nurturing, calm experience of babies born to term who are immediately allowed to bond both physically and emotionally with their parents. Second, premature babies may be exposed to certain treatments, including corticosteroids, that can change their metabolic and hormonal development, priming them to be more sensitive to stress and anxiety, for example. And concerned parents of premature infants may tend to be over-protective of their children throughout childhood, contributing to the child’s tendency to avoid risk and worry more. **MORE:** [Extremely Premature Babies Face Developmental Issues, Study Says](http://time.com/3705755/premature-babies-developmental-risks/) While personality can’t be traced to one particular experience or event, the scientists suggest that prematurity should be investigated further as a potentially important aspect of personality development. “Defining a general personality profile and understanding its aetiology are important because this higher order personality factor may help to partly explain the social difficulties \[prematurely born\] individuals experience in adult roles, such as in peer and partner relationships and career,” the authors write. ## Transcript I liken it to the feeling when my friends get engaged and they're so excited that they just solved this huge mystery in their life, and I'm happy for them. But, when I went through it and when I froze my eggs, I realized that I I've done this for myself. There was no man swooping in to fill in this puzzle piece. That was really empowering to know that I took fate into my own hands, and have changed the path of my life, because I wanted to, and I could. [ MUSIC ] I have a lot of these dreams that I wanna live out on my timeline. A lot of those dreams include long spans of international travel. I wanna write a novel. At one point, I'd love to be a TED talker. And so I was at my gynecologist office and she was so supportive when I was telling her about my dreams. And I was having a lot of anxiety How I was going to fulfill all these dreams before 32, 33, 34. And so we started talking about egg freezing. I kind of brought it up to her as a joke. And she said, you know, you should really think about this. And so she referred me to a doctor. We've seen a transformation in the type of patient who comes in for elective egg freezing. Six or seven years ago, it was often a woman who was experiencing concerns over her reproductive potential, Many of them already had diminished ovarian reserve. We could fast forward that today, where the woman are coming in. They're 35 years old, very frequently. The buzz is in the air at the company that Women her age, in her situation, are taking charge of their fertility, are coming in and freezing their eggs. So the culture has changed dramatically. [ MUSIC ] So I'll show you what we're basically trying to do is replace the water in the cell with a sugar- based cryoprotectant solution so that there are no ice crystals. Ice crystals cause damage to cell membranes [ BLANK_AUDIO ] Okay. Now I'm going to load the eggs onto the cryo device. All right, and then they get plunged into the liquid nitrogen. So this is the liquid nitrogen tank. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] This one here [ BLANK_AUDIO ] [ INAUDIBLE ] That's it. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] We've been fortunate enough to have dozens of women achieve a healthy pregnancy after using their thawed eggs. Recent reports in the literature suggests that over 10, 000 healthy babies have now been born from egg freezing technology. But some of those numbers that you just mentioned. Those are often just any births from a frozen egg. They don't necessarily distinguish between whether the egg was frozen by a donor or by a mother herself. Do you have any data about The number of babies that have been born from the mother's own frozen egg here at this clinic. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] So reports suggest that we've had over 10, 000 babies nationally and internationally from frozen eggs. But I know a lot of those babies aren't necessarily from women who have electively frozen their eggs for social reasons, many of them are from donor eggs. There is a difference from taking a 22 year old frozen egg and taking a 35 or 40 year old woman's egg. and someday thawing and fertilizing and transferring. So we have to be really careful about how we council patients. I know that many of the patients who freeze their eggs here are going to be able to someday have a healthy baby, but it won't be everybody. That's why it's not an insurance policy. It's just an opportunity to take some control over something we've really never had control of before. The truth about egg freezing is it's a relatively new procedure. It was just declassified as being experimental about a little over a year ago. So for that reason, there is not this large, comprehensive data pool of the number of eggs frozen, and then thawed, that have become babies. The vast majority of eggs that have been frozen have not been retrieved yet. So women have to understand that there are no numbers for them to call from when they are looking for will this work me. Because I'm 28 and my fertility is the best that it will ever get, I was able to do everything in one round. And I didn't understand the power of that until I woke up in the hospital right after surgery next to a 34 year old woman and she told me this was her third time trying this year, that's putting your body through three rounds of hormone injections, three surgeries And it's three times as expensive. And so the moment that really validated it for me was when this 34 year- old woman who had done 3 rounds in a year turned to me and said, wow. I wish someone had told me to do this at 28 cuz I would have. Some physicians and some marketing fertility arms do push women to freeze their eggs when they're at a very young age. Other clinics prefer that women wait until age 30 because what they've found is that the younger you are when you freeze, the less likely you are to need the eggs later on. However, as with most things in life, this is a double- edged sword. The younger you are, the better the quality of your eggs is going to be. Decreasing fertility starts during the time a woman is in her late puberty and goes throughout her life. Even when a woman is still getting her period in her late forties or even early fifties, it doesn't mean she's making normal eggs and that they're gonna be able to end up with healthy babies from that. It's not the success rate. It's the success rate for women like you. Are you 29? Are you 39? Are you 33? How are your tubes? Or do you have endometriosis? What's your hormonal health like? What's your body mass index? There are a huge number of varietal. That will determine conception success, whether it's natural or medically enhanced. Before I did all the research, I thought egg freezing was easy. And then I started reading blogs. And I started to get a sense of like whoa, your body goes through a lot. You're essentially forcing yourself to go into pregnancy mode in two weeks instead of nine months. I mean my estrogen shot up from 61 to 1900, I felt crazy. And I wasn't really prepared for that. Most of the women that have reached out to me The overall theme is, thank you for bringing awareness to the gravity of how much you put your body through, how much time this takes, how different your life is. Women shouldn't take this lightly, it's a big financial consideration, it's a big health consideration. It's a month of your life that you're sitting at home, you're not dating, you're not drinking, you're not smoking, you're not partying, you're not traveling. That was really hard for me Me. I mean I was up every morning at 7 AM to get an ultrasound, and a blood test. [ MUSIC ] I think there's no guarantee in life, right? No guarantee that I could have a child naturally, and there's no guarantee that one of these implanted embryos will stick. So, all that I can do is Is give my kids the best shot of a healthy future as possible. [ MUSIC ] Egg freezing is an amazing Oppurtunity but it is not. Absoutely not. An ironclad insurance policy. Know that going in. Hedging your bets is always a good idea in life. And you've got about $ 17000 in your back pocket that you're not gonna notice if it goes away Consider egg freezing. 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