Personality differences and COVID-19: are extroversion and conscientiousness personality traits associated with engagement with containment measures?

Differences in adherence to COVID-19 pandemic containment measures: psychopathy traits, empathy, and sex

“…17,18 Taking into consideration the association between individual differences and adherence to COVID-19 containment measures, 4 which is in line with previous findings suggesting personality traits as associated with adherence to containment measures in the COVID-19 pandemic. [5][6][8][9] Furthermore, our findings add to the existing literature 7,[15][16] by indicating traits of psychopathy as associated with transgressive behaviors, and empathy traits as associated with cooperation. Conversely, even though there is evidence suggesting that men are more likely to exhibit behaviors typical of psychopathy than women, 17,18 no significant differences were found regarding adherence to containment measures and sex.…”

“…3 Adherence to containment measures depends on individual factors, 4 including personality traits. 5,6 Previous evidence indicates that people with high levels of empathy tend to adhere more to containment measures. 7 In contrast, people presenting high scores on the dark triad traits tend to adhere less to these measures.…”

Psychological Variables Related to Adaptation to the COVID-19 Lockdown in Spain

“…Therefore, these traits represent personality predispositions for subjective wellbeing and resilience, so they may be relevant in predicting how lockdown is experienced. In fact, it seems that people with high extraversion levels tend to have greater difficulty in reducing social proximity and show less engagement with lockdown measures, while people with high conscientiousness levels are more engaged with these measures (Carvalho et al, 2020). However, the studies linking personality traits to subjective wellbeing and resilience suggest that extraverted people tend to experience more wellbeing and resilience, not less (e.g., Brajša-Žganec et al, 2011;Oshio et al, 2018).…”

Daily Monitoring of Emotional Responses to the Coronavirus Pandemic in Serbia: A Citizen Science Approach

“…However, the results regarding the role of personality in epidemic-related behaviors and reactions seem to have been pretty scarce so far. Although a body of literature on psychological responses to pandemic is based on a five-factor model (e.g., Carvalho et al, 2020;Kroencke et al, 2020;Zettler et al, 2020), there are growing findings that the revised reinforcement sensitivity theory (rRST; Gray and McNaughton, 2000) may provide a relevant framework for studying behavior during epidemics. The rRST emphases the emotional and motivational tendencies that drive attention to environmental signals, and manifest in the human behavior and cognition (e.g., Corr and Krupić, 2017), which may be especially important for understanding responses to health crisis situations (e.g., Bacon and Corr, 2020) and processing health messages (e.g., Shen and Dillard, 2007).The rRST emphasizes the impact of neurophysiological factors on individual differences in behavioral patterns in reaction on (dis)incentives of various kinds (Gray and McNaughton, 2000;Corr and McNaughton, 2012) and proposes three emotional-motivational systems responsible for approach or avoidance behavior in situations that contain signals of reward and punishment/threat (Gray and McNaughton, 2000): the Behavioral activation system (BAS) responsible for reactions to all appetitive stimuli; the Behavioral inhibition system (BIS) defined as the basis for the processing of conflicting stimuli; and the Fight/Flight/Freeze system (FFFS) comprises defensive reactions to all aversive stimuli.…”

“…In this study, we examined factors contributing to the emotional responses to the threat of coronavirus infection and isolation due to a pandemic. Based on previous research (Xie et al, 2011;Gaygisiz et al, 2012;Bacon and Corr, 2020;Cao et al, 2020;Carvalho et al, 2020;Harper et al, 2020;Mazza et al, 2020;Qiu et al, 2020;Wang et al, 2020), it is assumed that emotional responses to a pandemic may be related to different factors, both basic dispositions and behaviors specific for the state of emergency. We expect BIS, Flight and Freeze to be associated with anxiety and fear related responses, and BAS and Fight primarily with reactions to isolation.…”