Edited by: Tilman Steinert, ZfP Südwürttemberg, Germany
Reviewed by: Georgios D. Floros, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece; Carmen Uhlmann, ZfP Südwürttemberg, Germany
This article was submitted to Public Mental Health, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry
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Attention has long been paid to exploring the role of personality in psychopathology. The Five Factor Model (FFM) of Personality, known as the “Big Five” model, is the most well-known model of personality (
College students are in the transitional period from adolescence to young adulthood. It is particularly interesting to explore the personality–psychopathology relationships in this population, because it demonstrates a period that is linked to neurological (
One way to address this question is to explore how different personality traits associate with emotion regulation (ER) styles, such as suppression vs. cognitive reappraisal, and furthermore relating to the distress of psychotic experiences. Emotion regulation can be understood as the conscious and unconscious processes by which one's emotional experience and expression are influenced (
Although these previous findings provide some evidence for the role of personality traits and emotion regulation in psychotic experience, several unanswered questions remain. There is currently no research focusing on the relationship between personality traits, emotion regulation and psychotic experience in non-clinical youth. Therefore, the aim of the current study is to investigate (1) the relationship between Big Five personality traits and psychotic experiences in a non-clinical youth population and (2) the mediating role of emotion regulation between personality traits and psychotic experiences. Based on earlier work, we hypothesized that:
Neuroticism is positively correlated with psychotic experiences and other dimensions of personality traits are negatively correlated.
Both of the strategies of emotion regulation mediated the relationship between personality traits and psychotic experiences.
A sample of 3,147 college freshmen were recruited at a Chinese university. Among them 3,120 students completed the questionnaires. The effective response rate was 99.14%. The participants' ages ranged from 17 to 25 years, with an average of 19.20 years (SD = 0.708). There were 1,224 female students (39.2 %) and 1,896 male students (60.8%). Prior to the study all the participants signed written informed consent. On behalf of the participants under 18 years the written informed consent from the caretakers was also obtained.
The 16-item version of Prodromal Questionnaire (PQ-16) measures psychotic experience. The PQ-16 is a shortened version of the 92-version of the PQ (
The emotion regulation questionnaire [ERQ, (
The Big Five personality factors were measured using Wang et al.'s (
All the participants volunteered to take part in this study, which took place at the end of the mental health education course. After they signed the informed consent form, participants completed a questionnaire survey, including measures from the Prodromal Questionnaire, the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, and the Big Five Personality Inventory in a quiet classroom environment. It took ~15 min for the participants to complete all the surveys.
The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS 17.0) was used to conduct all statistical procedures. Pearson correlation was applied to examine how levels of psychotic experience and emotion regulation strategies as well as personality traits were related. In addition, Bonferroni corrections were applied to adjust for multiple comparisons; multiple regression analysis and the Sobel test were calculated to explore the mediating effect of emotion regulation on the relationship between personality traits and psychotic experiences. The Sobel test is a method of testing the significance of a mediation effect. The test is based on the work of Sobel (
The 3,120 college students aged from 17 to 25 years, with an average of 19.20. Among the participants, 1,224 (39.2%) were females. Descriptive statistics for all questionnaire measures are presented in Table
Descriptive statistics (
Psychotic experience | 1.31 | 2.775 |
Reappraisal | 30.54 | 5.606 |
Suppression | 16.24 | 4.631 |
Neuroticism | 17.53 | 6.486 |
Extraversion | 25.87 | 6.260 |
Openness | 29.79 | 6.280 |
Conscientiousness | 30.34 | 5.738 |
Agreeableness | 31.70 | 5.051 |
After the Bonferroni correction, the correlation shows that there are significant associations between psychotic experience, the five personality traits and two emotion regulation strategies (
Correlations between personality traits, psychotic experience and emotion regulation (
Extraversion | −0.309 |
||||||
Openness | −0.236 |
0.408 |
|||||
Conscientiousness | −0.294 |
0.301 |
0.346 |
||||
Agreeableness | −0.243 |
0.323 |
0.325 |
0.353 |
|||
Reappraisal | −0.231 |
0.205 |
0.255 |
0.314 |
0.313 |
||
Suppression | 0.317 |
−0.261 |
−0.089 |
−0.067 |
−0.197 |
−0.029 | |
Psychotic experience | 0.521 |
−0.237 |
−0.125 |
−0.190 |
−0.167 |
−0.140 |
0.283 |
According to Baron and Kenny (
Sobel test for the mediating role of reappraisal between personality traits and psychotic experiences.
Neuroticism—reappraisal—psychotic experiences | −0.192 | −0.064 | 0.015 | 0.009 | 6.216 |
Extraversion—reappraisal—psychotic experiences | 0.211 | −0.064 | 0.016 | 0.009 | −6.259 |
Openness—reappraisal—psychotic experiences | 0.272 | −0.064 | 0.015 | 0.009 | −6.620 |
Conscientiousness—reappraisal—psychotic experiences | 0.336 | −0.064 | 0.016 | 0.009 | −6.735 |
Agreeableness—reappraisal—psychotic experiences | 0.369 | −0.064 | 0.019 | 0.009 | −6.678 |
There are five supposed models to test whether the emotional suppression strategy mediated the relationship between personality traits and psychotic experiences. We also applied regression analysis with three steps for each model. At step 1, regression analysis was conducted with psychotic experiences as the dependent variable and each of the five personality traits as independent variables. At step 2, regression analysis was conducted with the suppression strategy as the dependent variable and each of the five personality traits as independent variables. The results of the regression analysis indicated that except for Conscientiousness (β = −0.032;
Sobel test for the mediating role of suppression between personality traits and psychotic experiences.
Neuroticism—suppression—psychotic experiences | 0.224 | 0.139 | 0.012 | 0.010 | 11.149 |
Extraversion—suppression—psychotic experiences | −0.199 | 0.139 | 0.013 | 0.010 | −10.291 |
Openness—suppression—psychotic experiences | −0.043 | 0.139 | 0.013 | 0.010 | −3.218 |
Conscientiousness—suppression—psychotic experiences | −0.026 | 0.139 | 0.014 | 0.010 | −1.841 |
Agreeableness—suppression—psychotic experiences | −0.189 | 0.139 | 0.016 | 0.010 | −9.001 |
Personality traits and emotion regulation strategies are potential protective factors against the distress from psychotic experiences. This study was conducted in a large non-clinical sample of youth and provides some of the first evidence linking personality traits, emotion regulation and psychotic experiences. As hypothesized, neuroticism was found to be significantly positively correlated with psychotic experiences, while extraversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness were found to be significantly negatively correlated. These findings are comparable with the conclusions of previous studies (
In addition, we found that extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness are significantly positively related to the use frequency of the reappraisal strategy and negatively related to the use frequency of the suppression strategy; neuroticism is significantly negatively associated with the use frequency of the reappraisal strategy and positively related to the use frequency of the suppression strategy These results are consistent with previous studies (
The findings also suggest that the use frequency of the reappraisal strategy is significantly negatively correlated with psychotic experiences; the use frequency of the suppression strategy is significantly positively correlated with psychotic experiences. The observed pattern of habitual usage of emotion regulation strategies, such as greater use of suppression in individuals reporting greater psychotic experience, is in line with what has been found in previous studies [e.g., (
We also confirmed the second hypothesis, that both strategies of emotion regulation mediated the relationship between personality traits and psychotic experiences. In the present study it was found that the reappraisal strategy significantly mediated the relationship between all five personality traits and psychotic experiences. The suppression strategy significantly mediated the relationship between such personality traits as neuroticism, extraversion, openness and agreeableness, and psychotic experiences. The construction of the personality traits manifests in groups of behavioral, emotional, and cognitive responses. The individuals with different personality traits (i.e., neuroticism and extraversion) employ emotion regulation strategies differently, which in turn influences the experiences of their emotions (
The current findings in this study suggest that certain emotion regulation styles and personality traits can function as protective factors against the psychotic experiences. This is particularly significant for suggesting interventions for non-clinical individuals with psychotic experiences. Although these experiences are distressing, they alone are not sufficient to warrant the use of anti-psychotic medication (
The results of this study should be interpreted in the context of several limitations. First, this study was implemented in a sample of college students, and to some extent it limits the feasibility of generalizing the conclusions. Second, we assessed distress of psychotic experiences via a self-reported instrument. It may lead to an overestimation of the prevalence of psychotic experiences due to the possible misinterpretation of the questions. Finally, the cross-sectional design of this study does not warrant causal inferences about the direction of the relationship between personality traits, emotion regulation and psychotic experiences. Whether adaptive emotion regulation can decrease the distress of psychotic experiences or, conversely, distress from psychotic experiences may promote maladaptive patterns of emotion regulation strategy use, needs to be further examined. Future research should seek to figure out these possibilities through a longitudinal, cross-lagged design.
Despite these limitations, the present findings emphasize the importance of personality traits and emotion regulation strategies for the mental health of youth in the general population and provide evidence connecting emotion regulation to the personality traits and psychotic experiences in the general population. These results suggest emotion regulation strategies as an important target for early intervention of psychotic and other psychiatric disorders.
This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of Medicine and Life Science, Tongji University (Protocol no. 2016YXY07), with written informed consent from participants of the study.
JS contributed to study design, recruitment of participants, data analysis, and interpretation and writing of the manuscript. YY contributed to recruitment of participants. CZ and ZM contributed to recruitment of participants and interpretation of results. FY contributed to recruitment of participants. XZ contributed to study design and interpretation of results. All authors have approved the final manuscript.
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
We wish to thank all the authors, researchers, and significant others who contributed to this study. We are grateful to Prof. Zisheng Ai from Tongji University for his support of data analysis.