What is the clinical evidence from this study?

Study design: Cross-Sectional. Population: Healthy individuals (n=54). Intervention: Neuroticism vs. Lower neuroticism. Primary outcome: Heart rate stress reactivity (OR 0.505, p=0.008).

November 28, 2017Open Access

The relationship between personality and the response to acute psychological stress

Key Result

Higher neuroticism was significantly associated with lower heart rate stress reactivity (OR 0.505, p=0.008) and lower cortisol stress response (OR 0.661, p=0.001) following acute psychological stress.

Study Design

Type

Cross-Sectional (n=54)

Multicenter

Structured PICO

Do personality traits predict physiological and psychological responses to acute psychological stress in healthy individuals?

Population

54 healthy university students aged 18-25 years, free of psychiatric or major physiological illnesses, underwent the Trier Social Stress Test to evaluate physiological and psychological stress responses.

Exposure

Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) for acute psychological stress induction (5-min preparation, 5-min speech, 5-min mental arithmetic)

Comparator

Baseline measurements (within-subject comparison)

Outcome

Stress response measured by heart rate (HR), salivary cortisol, positive affect (PA), negative affect (NA), and feeling of control (FoC)surrogate

Personality traits, particularly neuroticism, extraversion, and openness, are significantly associated with different physiological and psychological dimensions of the acute stress response.

Main Result

Odds Ratio: 0.505

p-value: p=0.008

Limitations

Participants were primarily concentrated on graduates and undergraduate students, limiting generalizability to broader age and education ranges.
Reliance on a self-report measure of neuroticism rather than an informant-report.
Potential unmeasured confounding variables such as coping styles, life events, and prefrontal function.
Some results could not survive the correction of multiple comparisons based on Bonferroni correction, raising concern for Type I error.

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.

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