Personality and stress

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed an upsurge of interest in how personality affects the stress process. This paper reports on a broad spectrum of findings on the relationships between personality and stress, taking transactional stress theory as the point of departure. A first part outlines the different approaches stress research has taken within personality psychology as opposed to research based on transactional stress theory and discusses the debate between these two paradigms. The second part gives an overview of empirical findings, with a focus on the Big Five personality factors, in order to demonstrate that personality affects the stress process in every aspect. The discussion suggests that we address unresolved problems of transactional stress research in the framework of interactionist personality psychology. Special attention ought to be given to developing a better understanding of situational characteristics, stress-producing mechanisms, and the functions of situational choices and coping strategies for personality.

Participative Management Style: A Tool to Enhance Quality Education

“…Participative management gives employees more responsibility for organizational performance and for making planning and organizing decisions, thus inherently signaling that the organization recognizes the employee can make important contributions to it (Luthans, 1995;Stevens & Ash, 2001). Previous studies (Penley and Tomaka, 2002;Vollrath, 2001) have indicated that highly conscientious individuals perceive themselves as able to meet situational demands, tend more readily to accept responsibility for problems that arise and persevere even when facing obstacles.…”

Pre-deployment dissociation and personality as risk factors for post-deployment post-traumatic stress disorder in Danish soldiers deployed to Afghanistan

“…Individuals with high neuroticism scores tend to appraise situations (even banal events) as highly threatening (Vollrath, 2001). Neuroticism is a general indicator of a vulnerability to experience anxiety and sensitivity to stress (McCrae, 2010), and has been linked to emotional disengagement and avoidant coping (Carver & Connor-Smith, 2010).…”

Job Stress in Young Physicians with an Emphasis on the Work-Home Interface: A Nine-Year, Nationwide and Longitudinal Study of its Course and Predictors

“…Even in a Scandinavian country with reasonably equitable working conditions across the genders, women still experience a greater total workload because they incur greater domestic responsibilities than men 24) . We also expect that personality traits may be important 25,26) , and have recently found that both neuroticism and conscientiousness may predict stress at medical school level 27) , and that neuroticism is a major predictor of general work stress during internship 28) . However, we have not studied stress beyond internship or controlled for other possible stress factors, such as the number of children and total working hours per week in a repeated measures predictor model.…”