Personality Traits and Depression

In research conducted by two individuals (2003), the notion that certain personality traits might influence depression and anxiety was explored. These researchers gave college students that measured certain personality traits. The instruments that they were given assessed levels of their belief in good luck, their attribution style, and levels of depression anxiety, self-esteem, neuroticism, and irrational beliefs. The results indicated that when an individual believes in good luck, then they are likely to have high levels of optimism but low levels of irrational beliefs. The reason that this is interesting is that typically it has been thought that the belief in good luck was maladaptive for the individual. But the conclusions of these researchers suggest that it might facilitate or at least be associated with an optimistic outlook. Similarly, low levels of irrational beliefs are also associated with an optimistic outlook. Such an outlook may be necessary for reduced levels of depression and anxiety.

There are some difficulties with this research. The first is that it involves only college students as the research subjects. Thus, the results may not be generalizable to other populations. Additionally, there was almost twice the number of women subjects as there were male subjects. Consequently, these results may be more applicable to females than males.

Our aim in the present study was to examine the relationship between belief in good luck and psychological well-being in the context of a number of cognitive and personality variables. Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients suggested that, among our respondents, higher depressive and anxiety symptoms were significantly and positively correlated with each other and that neuroticism and irrational beliefs were significantly and negatively correlated with internal, stable, and global attributions (a depressive attributional style), self-esteem, and
optimism.