The relationship between personality and the response to acute psychological stress

Abstract

The present study examined the relationship between personality traits and the response to acute psychological stress induced by a standardized laboratory stress induction procedure (the Trier Social Stress Test, TSST). The stress response was measured with a combination of cardiovascular reactivity, hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis reactivity, and subjective affect (including positive affect, negative affect and subjective controllability) in healthy individuals. The Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE) approach was applied to account for the relationship between personality traits and stress responses. Results suggested that higher neuroticism predicted lower heart rate stress reactivity, lower cortisol stress response, more decline of positive affect and lower subjective controllability. Individuals higher in extraversion showed smaller cortisol activation to stress and less increase of negative affect. In addition, higher openness score was associated with lower cortisol stress response. These findings elucidate that neuroticism, extraversion and openness are important variables associated with the stress response and different dimensions of personality trait are associated with different aspects of the stress response.

Figure 1

The development of stress responses over time. (a) Heart rate curve before, during and after TSST (Trier Social Stress Test). (b) Cortisol response before and after the TSST. Error bars shown are standard deviation of the mean.1/2/3/4: at 1 minute, 35 min, 60 min, and 75 min after the onset of the TSST task.

Figure 2

The general procedure of the experiment. The timeline shows the whole data-collecting procedure, including demographic data, saliva sampling (SS), heart rate (HR), the positive and negative affect (PANAS), Feeling of Control (FoC) and stress induction with the Terier Social Stress Test (TSST). Mini-IPIP: mini-International Personality Item Pool.