Coping with stress and its relationship with personality dimensions, anxiety, and depression

AbstractThe influence of personality on the way people cope with stressful situations has been discussed many times. It has even been discussed whether stress-coping styles and personality traits could be confused. In this paper, we examine the relationships between coping strategies in stressful situations and personality dimensions, and anxiety and depression. We also study the modulating effect of gender, both in the type of coping strategies used, as well as in its relationship with personality. To do this, a sample of 274 participants (56% women) completed assessment instruments of stress-coping styles, personality traits, locus of control, self-esteem, anxiety, and depression. Correlation analyses and tests of mean differences were carried out.In general, differences in coping styles between groups of participants with both high and low levels in different dimensions of personality were found. Furthermore, it was observed that gender modulates the coping styles used (for example, although task-focused coping is used equally by both genders, the emotion-focused coping is used more by women). Considering overall measures of coping styles, the results indicate that task-focused coping is used more by participants with low external locus of control, high self-esteem, and low anxiety and depression. On the contrary, the emotion-focused coping is used more by participants with high external locus of control, low self-esteem, and high depression. However, gender exerts a modulating effect on these results.Finally, some suggestions are made on assessment of coping styles, for the purpose of supplementing information from the questionnaires with other methods (rating scales, etc.)