engleski

Personality traits and negative emotional states: Gender differences and the Dark Triad

Personality traits have been identified as the important predictors of psychological distress. Recent findings suggest that one of the most popular personality models, the Big Five model, does not fully account for all the individual differences in personality functioning. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate relations between negative emotional states and the Big Five personality traits and the Dark Triad personality cluster (i.e. Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy). Moreover, we investigated whether there are gender differences in these relations. The sample consisted of 651 students from various faculties of the University of Zagreb (389 female, 260 male), with mean age of 21.73 years (SD=1.94). Negative emotional states were measured by Depression Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS-21, Lovibond & Lovibond, 1995), while the personality traits were measured by IPIP-50 (Mlačić & Goldberg, 2007) and the Short Dark Triad (SD3, Jones & Paulhus, 2014). Results of the hierarchical regression analyses showed that the basic personality traits were the sole predictors of negative emotional state of depression (explaining 35% of the variance in males and 22% in females), while the dark traits had incremental validity above and beyond the basic personality traits in prediction of anxiety and stress. Moreover, gender differences were observed in these relations: while it seems that the basic personality traits were more pronounced in explaining stress and anxiety in females (explaining 11.3% and 21% of the variance compared to 8.5% and 10.7% in males, respectively), the dark traits were more pronounced in explaining stress and anxiety in males (explaining additional 7.9% and 10.7% of the variance after the basic traits, respectively). The gender differences reflect theoretically meaningful relations that are discussed in terms of evolutionary psychology.

Personality; Dark Triad; depression; anxiety; stress; gender differences

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