Personality traits and depressive symptoms: The moderating and mediating effects of resilience in Chinese adolescents

Highlights

• Personality traits were associated with depressive symptoms.

• Resilience respectively moderated the associations of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness with depressive symptoms.

• Resilience partly mediated the associations of all five personality traits with depressive symptoms.

Abstract

Background

Various studies showed that personality traits and resilience might have impacts on depressive symptoms, separately. However, the relationships among personality traits, resilience and depressive symptoms are still undefined. Thus, this study tried to explore the potential effect of resilience on the associations between personality traits and depressive symptoms in Chinese adolescents.

Methods

Adolescents (n = 6019) aged 10–17 years were recruited from nine schools in Wuhan, China. Depressive symptoms, personality traits, and resilience were evaluated by the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression scale (CES-D), the NEO-Five Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI), and the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC), respectively.

Results

Neuroticism was positively associated with depressive symptoms, whereas extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness were negatively associated with depressive symptoms. Resilience separately moderated the associations of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness with depressive symptoms, and partly mediated the associations of all five personality traits with depressive symptoms.

Limitations

This study is a cross sectional study and cannot ascertain the causal relationships between the variables. Also self-reported questionnaire instruments were used in the data collection.

Conclusions

These findings suggested that resilience might play moderating and mediating roles in the associations of personality traits with depressive symptoms, and prompted that it was critical to improve resilience and develop adaptive personality traits in the prevention and intervention of depression in adolescents.

Introduction

Depression is a common psychological disorder in adolescents. During puberty, the incidence rises sharply, and the estimated one year prevalence of depression exceeds 4% by the end of adolescence (Thapar et al., 2012). As the subclinical stage of depression, depressive symptoms were more pervasive in adolescents. More than 20% of adolescents in China aged 10–15 years suffered from depressive symptoms in 2018 (Zhou et al., 2018). Furthermore the consequences of depression are serious. WHO ranked depression as the largest cause of disability (WHO, 2017). However, the etiology of depression onset is still undefined. Besides hereditary and environmental factors (Zheng et al., 2016), the effect of personality on depression has received increasing attention over a long period of time.

Personality is defined as a set of stable and enduring psychological qualities that influence an individual's characteristic pattern of behavior across different situations and over time (Gerrig and Zimbardo, 2011). In the background of the Five-Factor Model (FFM) of personality (Goldberg, 1993; Markon et al., 2005), many studies have examined the effects of specific personality traits on depression. A meta-analysis including 175 studies reported that high neuroticism and low conscientiousness were associated with both major depressive disorder and unipolar disorder, while unipolar disorder also showed low extraversion (Kotov et al., 2010). Subsequently, similar associations of neuroticism, extraversion and conscientiousness with depressive symptoms were also observed in an individual-participant meta-analysis with over 115 000 participants from 10 cohort studies (Hakulinen et al., 2015). However, only one study investigating Chinese individuals was included in Kotov's meta-analysis and none in Hakulinen's study. Meanwhile, although the two reviews reported depression had no relationships with agreeableness and openness, recently, a nationally representative cross-sectional study in Korean showed that, besides extraversion and emotional stability, agreeableness was associated with depressive symptoms after controlling for childhood abuse and socio-demographic factors (Lee and Song, 2017). Therefore, it is still necessary to explore the influence of the personality traits of Chinese people with oriental culture on depression, and the pathways between personality traits and depressive symptoms may be complicated but not well understood. Moreover, not all individuals with maladaptive personality traits go on to develop depression, suggesting the possibility that additional protective factors such as resilience may influence the likelihood of depression onset.

Resilience is conceptualized as the process of an individual's adapting well to adversity and the ability of “bouncing back” from stressful experiences (Gail, 2003; Fischer et al., 2018). Extensive evidence from cross-sectional studies showed that resilience was negatively correlated with depression (Wingo et al., 2010; Ding et al., 2017; Poole et al., 2017). Two longitudinal studies confirmed that resilience reduced the risk of depression in individuals with childhood trauma experience (Schulz et al., 2014) and alleviated polygenic vulnerabilities of depression (Navrady et al., 2018). Thus, resilience might protect against depression by lessening or counteracting the negative influence of risk factors of depression.

Researchers have suggested a relationship between personality traits and resilience (Riolli et al., 2002; Oddgeir et al., 2005; Collishaw et al., 2007; Oshio et al., 2018). Linley and Joseph found that some personality traits such as openness, agreeableness and extraversion predicted positive adjustment and adaption following trauma (Linley and Joseph, 2004). Results from a cross-sectional study in undergraduates suggested that low neuroticism, high extraversion and conscientiousness significantly increased resilience (Campbell-Sills et al., 2006). The researchers took the position that people with such adaptive personality traits were liable to experience positive emotions, obtain social interaction and adopt effective problem-solving method such as task-oriented approach when encountering adversities. Recently, a review of previous research also suggested that personality traits were one of the influencing factors of resilience, because positive personality traits predisposed individuals to proactively cope with adversity under positive appraisal style and ultimately develop resilience (Kalisch et al., 2015).

Given previous research, perhaps resilience plays a crucial role in the relationship between personality traits and depression. It is also plausible that personality traits and resilience may interact in predicting the development of depression. A recent study in adults revealed that resilience and neuroticism were two independent mediators, and could not mediate the association of genetic susceptibility with major depressive disorder as one latent variable (resilience+ neuroticism). However, the research didn't take the interaction of neuroticism and resilience into consideration (Navrady et al., 2018). In addition, the effects of the remaining four personality traits and resilience on depression hadn't been analyzed in Navrady's study. Currently, no study has explored these relationships in adolescents, and the effects of personality traits and resilience on depression onset are unclear. Thus, this study would provide a new perspective on perfecting personality and cultivating resilience for the prevention and intervention of adolescent depression.

Hence, this study aimed at exploring the relationships among personality traits, resilience and depressive symptoms in Chinese adolescents. We presumed that personality traits would impact the development of depressive symptoms in adolescents. In addition, we hypothesized that resilience might function as a mediator and moderator of the relationships between personality traits and depressive symptoms. The hypotheses models were illustrated in Fig. 1.