Prosocial Personality Traits and Adaptation to Stress

Abstract

Evidence suggests that personality traits may play a significant role in individual differences in cortisol reactivity in stressful situations. In this study, cortisol responses to public speaking were examined to test hypotheses that reactivity would be positively related to openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, and negatively to extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism, respectively. A sample of 75 students (56 women and 19 men) completed the NEO Five-Factor Inventory (Costa & McCrae, 1992) and the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Revised (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1985), and 2 saliva samples were taken before and after the stressor, and another 2 samples at similar times on a control day. Results revealed that conscientiousness was associated with an enhanced cortisol response to stress, while psychoticism was correlated with a blunted response.

Adolescent Personality: Associations With Basal, Awakening, and Stress‐Induced Cortisol Responses

“…Similarly, high levels of Neuroticism have been associated both with increased responses (Habra, Linden, Anderson, & Weinberg, ; Houtman & Bakker, ) and with blunted cortisol responses (LeBlanc & Ducharme, ; Oswald et al., ; Phillips, Carroll, Burns, & Drayson, ). With regard to Conscientiousness, associations seem to be a bit more consistent: Either no consistent association was found (e.g., Oldehinkel, Hartman, Nederhof, Riese, & Ormel, ; Oswald et al., ) or higher Conscientiousness was related to enhanced cortisol responses (Garcia‐Banda et al., ; Oldehinkel et al., ). Given our earlier argument that HPA‐axis reactivity reflects effort, it may be plausible that the previously reported inconsistent findings between stress reactivity and personality traits (i.e., the positive as well as the negative associations that have been reported for various traits) mainly reflect some fluctuation around the nonsignificant relation between personality and stress‐induced HPA‐axis reactivity.…”

Neuroticism and extraversion in relation to physiological stress reactivity during adolescence

“…However, the majority of studies failed to find an association between physiological reactivity and neuroticism and/or extraversion (e.g. Arnetz & Fjellner, 1986;Garcia-Banda et al, 2011;Glass, Lake, Contrada, Kehoe, & Erlanger, 1983;Kirschbaum, Bartussek, & Strasburger, 1992;Schommer, Kudielka, Hellhammer, & Kirschbaum, 1999).…”

The effect of progressive muscle relaxation on daily cortisol secretion

“…One strand of the wider program of research mentioned above involved exploration of detailed cortisol profiles in relation to personality and in particular Neuroticism as a possible stress vulnerability trait (Garcia-Banda et al 2011;Garcia-Banda et al 2014). While we had no firm hypothesis in this study in regard to the possible modulation of any intervention effects by Neuroticism, the availability of these data allowed us to include Neuroticism along with sex, age and smoking status in subsidiary analyses to demonstrate if necessary that any obtained stress reduction effects were independent of these individual difference variables.…”