Unraveling resilience: Personality predicts exposure and reaction to stressful life events

Abstract

Resilience is a key construct in psychology, which describes the maintenance of comparatively good mental health despite of environmental adversities or successful recovery from such adversities. Furthermore, it labels a specific personality type, characterized by high levels across the Big Five. However, whether the resilient type predicts less unfavorable mental health changes around environmental adversities remains unresolved. In a nationally representative sample from the Netherlands (LISS panel, N = 12,551), we longitudinally examined whether changes of internalizing symptoms around four stressful life events (unemployment, disability, divorce, and widowhood) differed between resilients and non-resilients. Internalizing symptoms increased before but decreased after each event, indicating recovery. Compared to non-resilients, resilients experienced a weaker symptom increase before the onset of unemployment and a stronger symptom rebound after the onset of disability. Thus, resilients maintained higher levels of mental health and recovered faster when faced with specific adversities, which underscores the importance of personality types in resilience.Stressful life events occur in the life of many people. Here, we investigated how psychopathological symptoms change in the years before and after the onset of unemployment, disability, divorce, and widowhood. We also tested whether these changes differ between two major personality types: Resilients, who score comparatively high across the Big Five traits extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness versus non-resilients, who score lower on these traits. Compared to non-resilients, resilients experienced a weaker symptom increase before the onset of unemployment and recovered better after the onset of disability. These findings underscore that personality trait configurations can predict individual differences in people’s ability to cope with adverse experiences. Assessing non-resilient personality types could improve an early identification of high-risk individuals, who might benefit from targeted prevention. We examined changes of internalizing symptoms around stressful life events. We tested whether these changes vary by personality type. We used data from a nationally representative sample from the Netherlands. Before unemployment, symptoms increased less in resilients versus non-resilients. Moreover, resilients recovered better after the onset of disability.