Coping and Personality: Third Time's the Charm? (original) (raw)

Personality and Coping: Three Generations of Research

Journal of Personality, 1996

This article introduces the Joumal of Personality's special issue on coping and personality. It first presents a historical overview of the psychological study of how people cope with stress and identifies three generations of theory and research: (a) the psychoanalysts and the ego development school, which tended to equate personality and coping strategies; (b) the transactional approach, which appeared in the 1960s and emphasized situational and cognitive infiuences on coping while downplaying the role of individual differences; and (c) the most recent, "third generation," whose work is represented in this special issue and focuses on the role of personality in coping while maintaining strong operational distinctions among coping, personality, appraisal, and adaptational outcomes. This introduction concludes with a discussion of unresolved conceptual and methodological issues and a brief orientation to the third-generation articles that follow in this special issue.

Conceptual Understanding on Personality Traits and Coping Strategies

There is a growing body of literature that recognizes the importance of coping strategies for assessing personality traits. The concepts of coping strategies and personality traits are viewed from numerous perspectives. This systematic review assesses the significance of personality theories, dimensions of coping strategies, and discusses the relationship between personality traits and coping strategies. Results from earlier studies demonstrated a strong and consistent using the Big Five Personality Theory to measure individual personality traits and employing problem-focused and emotion-focused coping strategies for measuring coping strategies in numerous situations. So far, there has been little in depth discussion about the relationship between the effects of personality traits on coping strategies and factors that affect the assortment of coping strategies. Therefore, more research on coping strategies and personality traits need to be undertaken in order to obtain a better understanding of these relationships.

On line edition License Creative Commons 4.0: BY-NC-ND -39 - Personality and coping. What traits predict adaptive strategies

Título: Personalidad y afrontamiento. ¿Qué rasgos predicen las estrategias adaptativas? Resumen: Las estrategias de afrontamiento utilizadas desempeñan un papel esencial en la adaptación a los cambios de los adultos mayores, y los rasgos de personalidad son factores predictivos importantes de estas estrategias. El objetivo de este estudio fue analizar qué rasgos predicen diferentes estrategias de afrontamiento en adultos mayores. Los participantes fueron 226 adultos mayores (60 a 88 años). Los instrumentos utilizados fueron el NEO-FFI para evaluar la personalidad y el Cuestionario de estrategias de afrontamiento (CAE). Se realizaron modelos de regresión lineal múltiple. El neuroticismo predijo positivamente las estrategias orientadas a la emoción: autofocalización negativa, expresión emocional abierta, evitación y religión. Los rasgos de apertura a la experiencia, amabilidad y responsabilidad predijeron positivamente las estrategias de afrontamiento orientadas a los problemas: apertura a la experiencia (resolución de problemas), amabilidad (reevaluación positiva) y responsabilidad (resolución de problemas y reevaluación positiva). Además, la amabilidad y la responsabilidad predijeron de manera negativa las estrategias orientadas a la emoción: expresión emocional abierta y autofocalización negativa. La extraversión no predijo ninguna estrategia de afrontamiento. Estos hallazgos muestran que el neuroticismo es un rasgo desadaptativo durante el envejecimiento, mientras que la apertura a la experiencia, la amabilidad y la responsabilidad son rasgos adaptativos en los adultos mayores.

Personality and Coping: A Multidimensional Research on Situational and Dispositional Coping

Exploring the relationships among situational coping responses, dispositional coping styles, and personality traits is a necessity to provide effective psychological help. Twohundred and sixtyone students (50.6 % male; mean age 22.13 years) enrolled in the College of Education at Marmara University, Istanbul, responded to the Ways of Coping with Stress Scale and the NEO Five Factor Inventory. Results indicate high correlations between situational and dispositional coping (i.e., Seeking Social Supportsituational and Seeking Social Supportdispositional, r = .70; p < .01; Submissivesituational and Submissivedispositional, r = .65; p < .01). In addition, moderate, but statistically significant, correlations between personality traits and coping were found (Neuroticism and Optimistic, r = .48, p < .01; Neuroticism Dispositional and Optimistic Situational r = .45, p < .01). Results are discussed in terms of personality and counseling applications.

Coping strategies within a personality space

Most taxonomies of coping have been built as if coping strategies were unrelated to all other aspects of personality. However, the evidence suggests some overlaps, and it may be that basic personality axes such as constraint, fearfulness or affiliation constitute a meaningful organizing principle for coping. In a sample of 499 outpatients, we examined the ability of the Temperament and Character Inventory to predict the fifteen coping strategies measured by the COPE. We also studied the joint structure of personality dimensions and coping. Engagement strategies were mainly enacted by subjects with low fear, high self-efficacy and high persistence, whereas roughly the opposite was true for Disengagement. Help-seeking strategies were exclusively aligned with affiliation dimensions. Our results clarify the empirical structure of coping strategies, and locate them within the broader and better-known space of personality axes.