Association between personality traits and suicidality by age groups in a nationally representative Korean sample

Abstract

Suicide is a leading health issue, which substantially contributes to the causes of death worldwide. Personality traits are some of the major risk factors for suicidality. We sought to identify the relationships between personality traits and suicidality by age group.The Big-Five Inventory-10 traits were measured in community-dwelling individuals in a nationally representative sample in the Republic of Korea. Because personality traits are long-standing patterns throughout one's lifetime, suicidality was measured based on lifetime history, rather than in a recent period. To comprehensively examine independent influences of personality traits on suicidality, psychiatric comorbidity and sociodemographic data were adjusted for.A total of 6022 subjects (3714 females and 2308 males) were included. Agreeableness (odds ratio (OR) [95% confidential intervals (CI)] = 0.79 [0.64-0.98]) was negatively associated with suicidal ideation, whereas neuroticism (1.27 [1.05-1.54]) and openness (1.36 [1.11-1.67]) were positively associated with suicidal ideation among young adults. ) had a positive association, and conscientiousness (0.86 [0.75-0.98]) had a negative association with suicidal ideation among the middle-aged group. Neuroticism is the only influencing factor for suicidal attempts among the young adult (1.88 [1.24-2.86]) and older (1.65 [1.24-2.20]) groups.Given the differential associations between personality traits and suicidality by age groups, future studies are needed to comprehensively identify possible roles of personality in suicide by age.

Investigating the phenotypic and genetic associations between personality traits and suicidal behavior across major mental health diagnoses

“…An association of neuroticism with increased suicidal behavior risk has already been described in population-based cohorts [14,28,29] and studies on individuals with personality [30] or affective disorders [31][32][33]; our secondary analyses confirmed these findings in patients with MDD (the largest diagnostic group in our study) and showed similar effects for BD and SCZ, suggesting that neuroticism may represent a transdiagnostic risk factor for SI [34].…”

“…In contrast, high extraversion is associated with higher levels of energy and sociability and more positive affect [12]. Hence, multiple studies have provided compelling evidence that high neuroticism and low extraversion are important risk factors for suicidal behavior [13][14][15]. A substantial amount of the phenotypic variance of these personality traits is explained by common genetic variants: single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)-based heritability estimates range from 6 to 15% for neuroticism and 5% to 18% for extraversion [11,12,16,17].…”

A Systematic Review on Suicide and Youth: Biological, Psychological, Social and Environmental Risk Factors

“…Thus, severe suicide attempters showed significantly higher hopelessness than the general population (Wolfe et al, 2019). In addition, neuroticism is a personality trait that has recently been identified as the most important predictor of suicide risk among youth (Hafferty et al, 2019;Khosravi & Kasaeiyan, 2020;Na et al, 2020). A higher level of neuroticism level causes vulnerability, anxiety, impulsivity, depression, and angry hostility.…”

Polygenic risk scores for neuropsychiatric, inflammatory, and cardio‐metabolic traits highlight possible genetic overlap with suicide attempt and treatment‐emergent suicidal ideation

“…In addition, anxiety traits/disorders and impaired self‐control have been closely related to the transition from SI to SA (Nock et al, 2009 ). Other personality traits, such as agreeableness and conscientiousness, have been linked with reduced SI rates, while neuroticism and openness were associated with higher SI, though all these effects were age dependent (Na et al, 2020 ). Individuals with early‐onset SA exhibited higher levels of neuroticism and lower levels of extroversion than nonsuicidal depressed individuals, while those with late‐onset SA outperformed depressed controls on orderliness, a subcomponent of conscientiousness (Szucs, Szanto, Wright, & Dombrovski, 2020 ).…”