Personality, individual differences, stress and health

Abstract

To conclude, the articles in this issue serve to illustrate current trends in research on personality and individual differences in stress and health research. Examining such dispositional and demographic factors is important for the identification of the profiles of traits associated with important adaptive outcomes such as psychological stress (Galanakis et al., 2009; Kozora et al., 2009; Kunst et al., 2009), mental health (Su et al., 2009), depression (Chen et al., 2009) and coping strategies (Kozora et al., 2009). The research has focused on important trait-like correlates of these outcomes such as dispositional coping strategies, personality factors (e.g. neuroticism, extroversion), demographic variables (e.g. age, gender, marital status, socioeconomic status) and genetic factors. The research is also illustrative of the common practice of examining interactions between individual difference, situational and environmental factors. Future research should focus on using results from personality and individual difference research to inform the tailoring of interventions to change behaviour and promote adaptive outcomes as well as to focus on behavioural correlates of the psychological outcomes that have tended to be the focus of these studies. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.