Spirituality and Personality: Understanding Their Relationship to Health Resilience

A growing body of research suggests there are important relationships among spirituality, certain personality traits, and health (organismic) resilience. In the present study, 83 college students from two southeastern universities completed a demographic questionnaire, the NEO Five Factor Inventory, and the Resilience Questionnaire. The Organismic resilience and Relationship with something greater subscales of the Resilience Questionnaire were used for analyses. Health resilience was associated with four of the Big Five personality variables and the spirituality score. Health resilience was positively correlated with ratings of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and spirituality and negatively correlated with neuroticism. Forty-three percent of the variance of the health resilience score was accounted for by two of the predictor variables: spirituality and neuroticism. These findings are consistent with the literature and provide further support for the idea that spirituality and health protective personality characteristics are related to and may promote better health resilience.