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Personality and Stress

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Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences

Abstract

Although everyone experiences stress, there are aspects of personality that may make some people more vulnerable to stress than others. Personality is characterized by five stable traits. These traits include neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, conscientiousness, and agreeableness. Of these, neuroticism is most consistently related to negative stress outcomes. This includes evaluating potentially stressful encounters as threats, which in turn promotes negative psychological, physiological, and behavioral responses. Other personality traits, such as openness, promote challenge appraisals and more positive stress responses. Although it is the case that some types of personality influence stress responses, it is important to keep in mind that the situations people find themselves in can also affect stress responses over and above that of personality.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Wright State University, Dayton, OH, USA

    Jennifer N. Baumgartner & Tamera R. Schneider

Authors
  1. Jennifer N. Baumgartner
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  2. Tamera R. Schneider
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tamera R. Schneider .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USA

    Virgil Zeigler-Hill

  2. Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USA

    Todd K. Shackelford

Section Editor information

  1. Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland

    Anna Czarna

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Baumgartner, J.N., Schneider, T.R. (2020). Personality and Stress. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24612-3_2115

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